Tonight’s selections from Hüsker Dü's fourth album, 1985’s New Day Rising. 40th anniversary even!
New Day Rising is the best pop record a hardcore band has ever made. An odd statement considering the almost vitriolic power behind hardcore, but that’s what makes New Day Rising, and Hüsker Dü in general, so utterly exciting—that a band could be fueled by this almost punishing power, yet still have a strong melodic backbone to their songs, even if said melodic backbone is draped in fuzz and pushed by an intangible force.
Hüsker Dü’s principal songwriters, guitarist Bob Mould and drummer Grant Hart, are the Lennon and McCartney of the punk rock era. Their professional relationship was a symbiotic one based on competition. If Hart wrote a great song, then Mould needed to write a better one, which may have made being in the band uncomfortable (especially considering the rumors of romantic entanglements between the two), but the competitive spirit paid out in dividends to listeners who were given perfectly crafted song after perfectly crafted song by two men who followed the punk aesthetic but were not afraid to let their pop flags fly.
New Day Rising, and the traditional song structures within it, was an evolution from Hüsker Dü’s previous effort, 1984’s Zen Arcade, a sprawling double album, and some would argue, the band’s masterpiece. But Zen Arcade is meant to be taken on the whole, despite such standout tracks as “Standing by the Sea” and “Turn on the News.” The difference between Zen Arcade and New Day Rising is that the latter is composed of great pop songs in their own right.
Unlike Zen Arcade, the pop songcraft of New Day Rising is pushed to the front. The album starts off with the title track, featuring stellar vocal harmonies, even if the only words are the title with some primal wails thrown in the for good measure. “Books about UFOs,” with its rollicking piano, is downright catchy, not something often heard about the hardcore set, but the great thing about this record is it’s true of all of these songs. — Treblezine
Celebrated Summer
After Zen Arcade, Hüsker Dü were left with a specific challenge: How do you follow up the genre-defining work that flipped hardcore on its head? Hüsker Dü had proven that pretty melodies and pop songs could live within hardcore’s fast and loud numbers. They also showed how punk could be thought-provoking and that concept albums need not be reserved for progressive rock, something that acts like the Hold Steady and Fucked Up took to heart a few decades later. They answered the call by doubling down on more of the same and, some would argue, made it even better.
The opening drum cadence and rising sequence to the opening track “New Day Rising” would set the tone for the rest of the record, which offered as much muscular intensity as it did melody. “New Day Rising” is not far off from Zen Arcade opener “Something I Learned Today”. Hüsker Dü used a post-punk bassline on the earlier track as their jumping-off point. “New Day Rising” came at listeners more directly, focusing on the metallic-sounding guitar and screams (and echoes of screams) that would return to listeners any time those words were spoken, let alone played through speakers.
Just listen to the first ten seconds of each of the opening three songs, which also includes “The Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill” and “I Apologize”, and one can hear the breadth of speed meets strength that was now able to be now communicated through Hüsker Dü’s music. The tunes on New Day Rising ultimately laid the groundwork for other bands to follow, whether it be the brooding elements of Mould’s songwriting that were taken up by Pixies and eventually grunge acts in their wake or the origins of pop-punk that were forged through Hart’s tracks. At the time, little could the band know the lasting influence they would have in the alternative music sphere. — Pop Matters
The Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill
Hüsker Dü’s music was always driven by tension – between Mould and drummer-vocalist Hart as songwriters, between the band and their label, SST, between the band and their hardcore purist fans, who were always one step away from crying sellout – and New Day Rising was no different.
With a power struggle ongoing between the trio, who sought to self-produce the LP, and SST’s in-house engineer Spot, who was forced upon them by the cash-conscious label, that tension is welded to the presentation of the songs. They’re scratchy and raw, washed out at times. They’re imperfect, just as Mould and Hart began to reach for pop-punk perfection with cast-iron classics such as I Apologize and The Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill.
“They were kind of working from within a classic pop structure,” Spot told Michael Azerrad in Our Band Could Be Your Life. “And doing something else with it. Kind of like they broke into it with a coat hanger and got the keys out and went on a joy ride. And then wore the tires out.” — Guitar Magazine
I Apologize
“I don’t remember any conflict inside the band,” Mould says. “We were all on the same page trying to make another record and were constantly driven to keep going and going. And we were determined to grab back the reins from anyone who was holding them and do the album the way we wanted it to be done.”
Hüsker Dü recorded New Day Rising in just a few days and often tracked songs in one or two takes. For the sessions, Mould played the same Ibanez Explorer he used on Zen Arcade through a Fender Silverface Deluxe Twin Reverb and an MXR Distortion Plus.
While he considers New Day Rising as an evolution of the band’s sound, Mould stops short of calling it revolutionary, and scoffs at the myriad critics who have ranked it among the best and most influential albums of all time.
“For me, it was just a continuation of the direction we were heading with Zen Arcade,” he says. “We had become better songwriters, so New Day Rising was a more melodic record. More than anything, though, it was the step before Flip Your Wig, which was the best moment for us as a band.” — Guitar World
If I Told You
It was called New Day Rising — a remarkable fifteen-song LP that would wake the country from its winter freeze in January of ’85. There is nothing subtle or subdued about this album. There are no touchy-feely instrumentals, no acoustic time-outs — enjoyable as those things were on Zen. Sure, the melodies and catchy choruses are there beneath it all, in typical Hüsker fashion, but New Day Rising is power from start to finish; forty fearless minutes of ferocious exuberance.
I’m not going to argue that Zen Arcade isn’t the better or more important album. It’s all the things the pundits have called it from the start: monumental, groundbreaking, a reevaluation of everything we thought punk rock could or should be. It’s a masterpiece. But almost too much of one, moody and broody at times, and a little too — what’s the way to put it? — serious. New Day is the brasher and looser album, with Mould and Hart clearing out the pipes, with nothing left to prove and absolutely hitting their strides. It is, if nothing else, the most supremely confident-sounding album of all time.
And it’s made all the more so through a daring, some might say controversial sound mix. There’s a very particular sound to this album — a treble-heavy mix that is like nothing before or since, in which every song is enveloped in a fuzzy, fizzing, needles-pegged curtain of sound. Many people — including the band members themselves, reportedly — have always rued this peculiar mix, but to me it’s the ideal vehicle for the group’s sound. Here is the “Hüsker buzz,” as I call it, naked and cranked to eleven. (What I wouldn’t give to hear some of the cuts from Zen Arcade or Flip Your Wig remixed like this.) The style is “hot” in soundboard lingo, but to me it has a crystalline, sub-zero quality: it sounds like ice. The songs are as melodically solid as any top-40 hits of the time, but all whipped up in a great Minnesota blizzard. — Ask The Pilot
New Day Rising
During Hüsker Dü’s lifetime, they held that unenviable place as being unsolicited trailblazers. Even their aggressively indifferent anti-look – perfectly embodied in bassist Greg Norton’s era-eschewing mustache and short shorts, not to mention his understated, underrated playing – had the band out-shlubbing even its Twin Cities couture-less cohorts.
Hüsker Dü did the work of crafting hardcore punk’s anti-intentions into more accessible production styles (something most fans agree they always struggled with), while remaining a college radio constant. As it turns out though, on punk’s admittedly sliding scale, Hüsker Dü was successful, certainly critically, and they sold more than any SST band ever had. The majors came calling, as usual, just about the time the band was nearly spent from working so hard and on the precipice of breaking up.
Of course Hüsker Dü being Hüsker Dü, they still cranked out three more great albums (including another double-LP) in two years, while touring like crazy before splitting apart like the beautiful, multi-hued starbursts in their last album’s (Warehouse: Songs and Stories, 1987) artwork – burning bright and leaving cool trails, but disintegrating off into the distance anyway. On New Day Rising’s cover, the dirty dogs are just starting to look off into a new sunrise, or is that a sunset…? — Rock and Roll Globe
Books About UFOs
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WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?
Jimmy Kimmel: Sam Rockwell, Glennon Doyle, Valerie June
Jimmy Fallon: Julianne Moore, Marc Maron, Jurnee Smollett, Tommy Brennan
Stephen Colbert: John C. Reilly, Eva Victor, Steve Buscemi
Seth Meyers: Ellen Pompeo, Jason Isaacs
After Midnight: The Final Tournament Championship (Series Finale)
Watch What Happens Live: Cynthia Nixon, Ricki Lake
