Bob Mould Solo Electric: Here We Go Crazy with J. Robbins

The legendary frontman for Hüsker Dü and Sugar returns to SPACE on a solo electric tour celebrating his new album, Here We Go Crazy, with J. Robbins (Jawbox, Burning Airlines, Channels).

When he calls, Bob Mould is finishing work on his 15th solo album, Here We Go Crazy. A distillation of the unfailing melodic skill, the emotional lucidity and dynamic fluency he’s developed over more than four decades, it’s also a typically bold realignment of his sonic paradigm. Its turbulent vignettes are scored by Mould’s familiar bruised tunefulness, but the sound is pared back to its fundaments, 11 songs blistering past in just over 30 minutes. “I’ve stripped things back to what excited me as a young guitarist,” he explains. “The energy, the electricity.”

Part of the inspiration for this more primal aesthetic is the heavy itinerary of touring he’s lately undertaken, several years spent circling the globe, either in the company of bandmates Jon Wurster (drums) and Jason Narducy (bass) or just by himself. “I was really throwing myself in the songbook and feeling where the audience is at,” he says. “And they were really responding to this very simple, just-me-and-a-guitar setup. And I thought, maybe I shouldn’t be overcomplicating things, ‘word’-ing or ‘craft’-ing it up. Just grab for the simple bits of life we still have control over: our emotions, our relationships.”

After shows, Mould would hang out signing merch and talking to fans. “Sometimes people bring a lot of their lifetime emotional content to me,” he says, “like they’ve compressed all this coal into a tiny little diamond. Sometimes I’m surprised at the weight of it, the heaviness. I’m like, ‘I’m here for you. I’m listening.’ I’m shocked and grateful they share so readily with me. I don’t know what I did to earn that trust.”

Mould has earned that trust with every record he’s made, channelling his own “lifetime emotional content” for songs of wisdom, honesty and volcanic intensity. His first band, Hüsker Dü, bared his angst over furious noise and turbulent melody, an indelible influence on generations that followed. But by the time Nirvana infiltrated the mainstream, Bob Mould had already moved on, having sequestered himself in a farmhouse to lick his wounds and learn new ways to sing his songs. His solo debut, 1989’s folk-rock masterpiece Workbook, was a record of depth and sophistication. Then he pulled another sharp turn, his power-trio Sugar alloying his most melodic songs with his fiercest noise, yielding his most commercially successful work yet.

Over the solo career that followed Sugar’s own mid-90s flameout, he’s displayed a maturing gift for songwriting, transcending the ‘alternative’ tag and recognised alongside key influences like Pete Townshend and Pete Shelley. He’s adrenalized classic forms, alchemised angst into something addictive and powerful. “I’m just trying to figure myself out,” he says. “After 64 years of life – 55 spent writing songs – it’s what I do.” The concepts that shaped the songs of subsequent albums reflect those years. The ruminative Beauty & Ruin (2014) and Patch The Sky (2016) were written in the wake of losing his parents and other loved ones. 2019’s Sunshine Rock was a homage to the early Capitol singles of the Beatles and the Beach Boys, constant companions through his turbulent childhood. The terse, political Blue Hearts (2020) was written and recorded amid the dying days of the first Trump administration.

Here We Go Crazy, meanwhile, arrives at another moment of uncertainty, a time of disruption and fear. Mould sees the songs unfolding like the three acts of a play, each act exploring distinct but related themes. The first handful of songs concern “control versus chaos”, Mould explains. The opening title track contrasts images of nature – deserts, mountains, fault-lines – with the tumult of human life. Inspired by a riff that Mould says “sounded like a fistfight”, ‘Neanderthal’ is “a snapshot from inside my head as a young kid: growing up in a violent household, everything being unsettled, feeling that fight-or-flight response at all times,” while ‘Breathing Room’ is “about feeling isolated, cramped-up, and literally needing that breathing space.”

The furious, dynamic ‘Fur Mink Augurs’ signals the second act, where the darkness descends. The song channels claustrophobia, and “the cold, crazy, late-winter feeling I grew up with in the Adirondacks and in Minnesota. When the cabin fever really sets in deep – when the permafrost is set and it never gets warm – you become frayed, and things can really unravel, quickly.” ‘Lost Or Stolen’ chronicles lives undone by “people losing themselves in their phones,” Mould explains. From this focus, he pulls back and digs into “ideas about depression, addiction, self-medication and collapse… The words just fell out of me.” This anguished middle-passage of the album concludes with the cathartic ‘Sharp Little Pieces’, exploring “the end of innocence, the idea of a young child’s trust being violated. For those of us who lost trust as children, it disappears in a flash, and we spend years struggling to regain that innocence. And maybe it never comes back.”

The song ends bluntly (Mould says the album’s “lack of sophisticated ornamentation is key – I was trying to stay out of the way of the songs, to strip away all the things I used to think were important, all those extra colours and complexities. I didn’t want to get deep into decorating the tree. I wanted to keep it simple, to use the simplest words”), raising the curtain on the closing act. The theme here is lifting oneself out of the darkness; ‘You Need To Shine’ is a song about “looking for the bright sides, the good parts of life, despite everything that’s happened”, Mould says, a sentiment borne out by the song’s spirited holler that “all that madness doesn’t matter anymore”. ‘Thread So Thin’ is “about trying to protect the one you love, and trying to feel protected”, Mould explains, while the closing ‘Your Side’ is a powerful love song from the edge of the darkness, Mould howling “If the world is going down in flames, I want to be by your side”. “We’re heading into a great unknown here,” Mould says, of the wider geopolitical and climate anxieties that inspired these songs. The message here is, simply, focus on that which can save you and deliver you from this moment. “This album talks a lot about uncertainty, helplessness, being on edge,” Mould adds. “How much can we control? How much chaos can we handle? In the end, the answer, the remedy, is placing your trust in unconditional love.”

Mould knows Here We Go Crazy is an album freighted with darkness; “There’s soothing melodies, and there’s lyrical discomfort,” he deadpans. “It’s manic, frantic, complex.” But no one ever came to Bob Mould for good news, for the easy answers. Pop music runs through his veins, as surely as the electricity that drives his chiming hooks into the realms of distortion, but he’s here to give you the truth, his truth. To give you songs that ring true when howled against a tornado of guitar, that compress all that “lifetime emotional content” into some kind of sonic diamond. There’s eleven of those precious gems here, sculpted to make the heaviness easier to bear, somehow. Treasure them.

J. Robbins is an independent music lifer. Starting out at the end of the 1980s playing bass in the final and longest-tenured lineup of DC hardcore mainstays Government Issue, he went on to gain prominence in the ’90s as the singer/ guitarist of the prolific and widely-traveled indie rock band Jawbox. That band’s sound developed to become a template for most of J’s later work: passionate and tuneful vocals set to driven guitars that swing between melody and clashing dissonance, atop complex and driving rhythms, abrasive post punk and melodic guitar pop influences in an always uneasy alliance greater than the sum of its parts. 

Releasing a slew of independent EPs and two full-length albums on DC’s iconic Dischord Records, Jawbox (like many of their peers from the music underground of the day) transitioned to the major label world in the mid-90s, going on to release two albums on Atlantic Records before disbanding. Returning — and rededicating himself —  to the indie music world and its ethos, Robbins almost immediately formed a new band with former GI bandmate and drummer extraordinaire Peter Moffett: Burning Airlines, which released two albums and toured the US, Europe, and Japan. 

Concurrently, however, Robbins had begun making a name in the studio as an in-demand  producer/engineer for bands in a new wave of post-punk indie music, such as Texas is the Reason, the Promise Ring, Jets to Brazil, and Braid. By the early 2000s, after the breakup of Burning Airlines, recording and producing other bands was his primary focus – though he also made time for personal musical projects such as Channels and Office of Future Plans (both of which released albums on Dischord), and Report Suspicious Activity (where he returned to playing bass, and which released albums on Alternative Tentacles and Arctic Rodeo Records).

Robbins is still highly active and maintains his primary focus as a producer/ engineer in his Baltimore studio, the Magpie Cage, recording bands of many styles, from all around the world — from stoner rock icons like Clutch, and The Sword, to Americana songsmiths June Star, epic rockers Daria (Angers FR) and the garage/afro-beat hybrid Des Demonas, to name a few. Since 2013 or so, Robbins’ main creative outlet as a songwriter/singer/musician has been writing and releasing music on solo records. Two so far: Un-Becoming (2019) and Basilisk (2024), both on Dischord Records.

Getting older has not meant slowing down; especially in the upside-down world we currently inhabit, it has only made the need to create more urgent. Robbins’  current writing is driven partly by a desire to write songs that can survive in all sorts of different arrangements, from solo acoustic (recent years have brought solo acoustic tours , including strings of dates in 2022 and 2024 supporting Bob Mould), to electronic, to rock band bashing away at top volume. “Un-Becoming” and “Basilisk” are solo records, with a broad sonic palette, but the sound of a rock band is still at their core, and collaboration is still key. 

J. Robbins (band) has varied in lineups, often including cellist/guitarist Gordon Withers and Robbins’ former Channels and Office of Future Plans bandmate Darren Zentek on drums. In 2024 the band coalesced into its current touring form as a power trio, with (War on Women founder/guitarist) Brooks Harlan on bass— a fixture in this role since Office of Future Plans formed in 2010 — and Peter Moffett (who also drummed on Un-Becoming) once again behind the kit. This lineup toured like crazy in 2024, including headlining tours around the US, festival appearances at The Fest (FL) and Caterwaul Festival in Minneapolis, and California dates supporting Sunny Day Real Estate.

J. Robbins (band) has already begun recording for a third full-length, and is looking forward to shows in France and Spain in April 2025 with dear friends Daria (Angers, FR), and a late Spring East Coast/Midwest run supporting Bob Mould Band on the “Here We Go Crazy” tour.