Bob Mould has announced new album Blue Hearts which will be out September 25 via Merge. He's definitely in a different mood than on last year's Sunshine Rock, sounding as pissed off as he's ever been, and Bob calls it “the catchiest batch of protest songs I’ve ever written in one sitting.”
The first single is "American Crisis," which was written during the sessions for Sunshine Rock but deemed "too heavy" for the album. “‘American Crisis’ is a tale of two times,” says Mould. “Past Time and Present Time. The parallels between 1984 and 2020 are a bit scary for me: telegenic, charismatic leaders, praised and propped up by extreme Evangelicals, either ignoring an epidemic (HIV/AIDS) or being outright deceitful about a pandemic (COVID-19).” It's a rager, with Mould screaming “I never thought I’d see this bullshit again / To come of age in the ’80s was bad enough / We were marginalized and demonized / I watched a lot of my generation die / Welcome back to American crisis.” Watch the video below.