Bob Mould unlocks something in me, a rotted chest that tries to secure all my anxieties in tight. It fails, venting resentment and anger and pain at inopportune moments, like it has for most of this week. That’s how it was yesterday, and after hours of being on edge, trembling and trying (and failing) to hide a stem where my hand makes these weird repetitive motions like I’m casting spell to wish it all away, I drove home, putting on Here We Go Crazy, Mould’s latest solo album. I was driving 20 mph, cars all around me frustrated and gunning to get past the school zone, and the chorus to the title track came up and the chest unlocked, and if you looked though the windows you would have seen an old, bald man just lose it, sobbing as he vainly tried to sing along. And here’s the thing: that’s not the only Bob Mould song to do that to me.

“Gift”, his opening track from 1994’s File Under: Easy Listening does the exact same thing. I came to Mould’s music via his 90s alternative rock outfit Sugar, not his pioneering punk days in Hüsker Dü, and so it’s the almost saccharine catch of his choruses and vocal melodies that define him for me. Listening to Here We Go Crazy I get those vibes again. It’s not particularly the lyrics that do it (though it’s hard to deny Mould has a way with words); it’s more the hook of those choruses, the way he harmonizes his voice and is able to craft the absolute perfect quick line and deliver it perfectly, often with that upwards lilt at the end, as he does on “Here We Go Crazy”.

The entire album shares that sense of tight, compact alternative rock and punk with delicate shades of pop shining through in two to three minute songs that stab in the gut with stories of refection and pain and – more recently – hope. There slamming razor slices of punk on the guitars for “Neanderthal” and “Sharp Little Pieces” but the melodies conflict in such a beautiful, utterly Mould-ian way. I added “When Your Heart Is Broken” to last week’s playlist and it’s another sterling example of how no one can craft a pop gem like Mould can.

It’s those super catchy, pop-inflected tunes that grab me the most, like “Breathing Room” and the more aggressive “Fur Mink Argurs”, but the whole album works as this concise rock missile straight into that part of my brain that is most affected by everything happening to me right now. I wasn’t expecting to be that confessional in this review, and honestly the more I write, the more it embarrasses me. It shouldn’t, but it does. Maybe that’s why I consume some of the music I do? It lets some of that escape, vent in a healthier way and allows a little more room inside.

I don’t know. I know I love Bob Mould’s music, and the way it works on those locks and straps and hidden compartments within.