Hüsker Dü fans have “a miracle year” ahead of them
And New Day Rising-era live album announcement appears to be the tip of the iceberg
📷 Hüsker Dü in a still from the It's Clean, It Just Looks Dirty video
40 years ago Hüsker Dü were on a high. The groundbreaking 1984 double album Zen Arcade had made a statement with the critics and started giving the Twin Cities trio the sort of commercial clout – albeit of the underground punk kind – that was attracting serious major label interest.
1985 would accelerate that momentum as Bob Mould, Grant Hart and Greg Norton put out two full length albums, released their first single to actually appear on an album, played their first show outside North America, made their first music video and signed to Warner Bros. Records.
At the start of the year came the January release of New Day Rising. Two weeks after their first album of 1985 came out the band played at Minneapolis’ First Avenue, recording it for a planned live album and video.
Guitarist Bob Mould would drop hints of those tapes in a 1986 interview with KFAI, telling the Minneapolis radio station about an “already mixed” upcoming live album. But only a short sample of the accompanying video footage would subsequently emerge, arriving on the 1987 video compilation It's Clean, It Just Looks Dirty (source of the clip below).
And that was it for the recordings… until now.
Hüsker Dü, live in ‘85
Archivists par excellence Numero Records, responsible for the lovingly packaged Savage Young Dü collection of early demos and live tracks in 2017, have unearthed those tapes and a full release is presumably immanent.
“On January 30, 1985, Hüsker Dü recorded a peak high performance to 24 track tape at Minneapolis’s First Avenue club in front of their hometown massive. This performance was supposed to come out as a live album later that year, but the band’s rapid upward trajectory caused priorities to shift,” the label said.
“The tapes were shelved – thought to be possibly lost in the same 2011 house fire that consumed a precious portion of the Hüsker Dü archive. Nearly 40 years later, these tapes have been rescued from the abyss.”
That task was performed by Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio Recording studio in Chicago, with mixdowns handled at San Francisco’s Tiny Telephone Recording by Beau Sorensen, who’s engineered Bob Mould’s last six solo albums.
The first part of the set was uploaded yesterday to Spotify and it sounds amazing, showcasing Hüsker Dü’s growing melodic confidence as they tear further apart the tightly sewn seams of hardcore orthodoxy.
Dashing through five songs in just under 11 minutes there’s a work-in-progress ‘Every Everything’, its guitar riff and lyrics yet to be totally nailed down, and an almost complete ‘Makes No Sense at All’. Both tracks would be recorded just months later for 1985’s second album Flip Your Wig, continuing Hüsker Dü’s tradition of playing at least one album ahead of their latest release.
Alongside them are storming renditions of ‘Terms of Psychic Warfare’, ‘Powerline’ and ‘Books About UFOs’, the latter highlighting the swing that drummer Grant Hart brought to the band.
Plans for the full release of the set, whether to streaming services or on all-important physical formats like CD and vinyl, remain tantalisingly opaque for now, but will surely be revealed in due course.
Similarly, for Hüsker Dü’s uber fans, there’s the question of whether the 30 January 1985 recording is of the First Avenue all ages afternoon show, at which they were joined by Soul Asylum’s Dave Pirner for a cover of The Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’, or the set later that evening at the venue.
However, those fans will probably delight in Numero’s announcement arriving on the exact week that 41 years ago Zen Arcade was released and that the band was ensconced in Minneapolis’ Nicollet Studios recording New Day Rising. Such fans may also nod knowingly to the fact that Hüsker Dü’s live debut album Land Speed Record and the 2023 collection of early shows Tonite Longhorn were also drawn from hometown sets.
We’ll do it our way this time
It’s been a little longer coming than I’d hoped when I broke the news that a new Hüsker Dü album was on the way, but finally Tonite Longhorn received a full launch last week.
They (though clearly I mean me as well) will have to be content for now with those first five tracks and Numero’s limited edition New Day Rising tour t-shirt. It’s only available to pre-order until 8 July 2025 so, if you want one, don’t delay in heading to Hüsker Dü’s Bandcamp page or the Numero website, with the latter looking like the better option for UK readers.
A bunch of boxes
I may be burying the lede on this post, but Numero’s Instagram post also casually notes that they have “a bunch of boxes of ephemera, photos, and tapes to go through”, concluding: “Sit tight; we’re in the midst of a miracle year.”
It’s quite the cliffhanger.
A truly ‘miracle year’ would be remastered and expanded versions of Hüsker Dü’s releases post-Everything Falls Apart, the debut studio album that came out on the band’s own Reflex Records. (Thus free of any label constraints it was tidied up and included on the Savage Young Dü boxset.)
The same cannot be said of Hüsker Dü’s SST output thanks to the prickly ego, and sharp business practices of SST label owner – and Black Flag head honcho – Greg Ginn, even though Savage Young Dü’s inclusion of material from the Metal Circus sessions seemed at the time to be a positive sign.
With Jim Ruland’s excellent SST book revealing the less than ideal conditions in which many of the label’s master tapes are kept there’s a possibility there might not be much left to recover from that period.
In which case, to continue my somewhat groundless speculation, perhaps the new live album is a stepping stone to 40th anniversary Warner Bros releases for Candy Apple Grey next year and Warehouse: Songs and Stories in 2027? At this stage, some 30 years after Warner Bros’ last looked to cash-in on Bob Mould’s Sugar success with the live compilation The Living End, any and all further Hüsker Dü releases would be welcomed.
And if they could be given some of the attention that reissues from contemporaries like The Replacements and R.E.M. have received, so much the better.
Time to burn
In lieu of well thought out words, this issue offers some video from UltraBomb’s excellent first UK gig at the Camden Underworld.
This is extremely exciting.
Exciting stuff! Thank you for the shout out, Dom. I've heard rumors since the publication of Corporate Rock Sucks that a former SST-employee who is no longer with us had many masters. So who knows? I never thought SST would give up the rights to I Against I but it happened so anything is possible...