Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0142 (November 7, 2025)

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HÜSKER DÜ 1985: The Miracle Year 4xLP (Numero Group)

Where we are in the fandom/nostalgia cycle with respect to Hüsker Dü practically qualifies the trio for sainthood. There is a certain supporter of their music that has no choice but to view them through this Judeo-Christian lens, how their alchemy from blazing fast hardcore to the greatest noise-pop band turned their sweat into wine, and also has to realize that, despite the fact that they worked themselves down to the bone, ultimately there’s not a lot to show for it, no way to make it better and no willingness for its members to have reconvened when there was still a chance.

Thing is, we can’t begin to tell how that story would go. The hardest part of the Hüsker Dü story is that there couldn’t be a victory lap, neither ideologically nor culturally (then) or in a corporeal sense (now). All the parts had to fit together, these three guys had to be deeply and constantly in one another’s lives for almost a decade, and at one point it stopped working and that was that. And it’s artifacts like this, a tangible representation of Hüsker Dü onstage at the peak of its powers (releasing two incredible albums in the same year, one of them being a pretty perfect album), that make it such a hard pill to swallow.

Yet swallow it we will: this corner of rock music in which they had to call home builds a large part of their story: they came in and did the work for us, selflessly, and of a quality that becomes more apparent, more foundational, as the years go on. A tomb can bear a lot of weight if it’s built well enough.

With one full set professionally recorded in Minneapolis (for some sort of video, as Mould mentions at the end), with New Day Rising on the brink of release and Flip Your Wig about a month out from recording, and a second collection culled from live dates from all over throughout the year, this is as clean and present a set we’ve ever heard from the band, barreling through a now-legendary setlist of songs going back to “In a Free Land” and “Diane” and forward to “Don’t Wanna Know If You Are Lonely,” to crowds of people who are either stuck in the then-recent past or tough enough to endure them; Bob has to stop a few times to tell people in so many words to not throw glass at them. Yet the hardest hits land with that sort of shattering impact. Hearing any fuller angle of their sound is never blunter than on here.

For all the screaming, spit and vitriol in here, there’s a heart borne of authoring the next steps for music away from hardcore, and it’s maybe never been presented more effectively, or a better case made for the group as a lost path to the future.

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