When you see the words “Sunshine Rock” emblazoned on the cover of a Bob Mould album, you figure there’s some irony at work.

But maybe not.

While the former Husker Du frontman’s music wasn’t all completely gray and stormy, it certainly resided in that climate. With “Sunshine Rock” he’s not suddenly sounding like Katrina and the Waves, but his 13th studio album finds the 58-year-old hardcore pioneer once dubbed a “miserablist” in a decidedly brighter mood.

Fortunately, people looking for the razor intensity of old Husker Du can still find some of that in the modern-day Mould, who has been prone to surprising twists in his 40-year career. It began in Minneapolis in the late ’70s/early ’80s with the unabashed fury of Husker, which upped the ante on punk over seven influential albums from 1982 to 1987, paving the way for Nirvana and its disciples a decade later.

When Husker went down in flames, in acrimonious fashion between Mould and late drummer Grant Hart, he launched his solo career in 1988, blending more intricate acoustic and folk elements on the brilliant “Workbook.”

With the emergence of grunge in the early ’90s, he was back in band mode with the souped-up alt-rock group Sugar. Then, things got weird later in the decade. After two more solo albums, he did a short stint as a scriptwriter for World Championship Wrestling — he immediately asked me about his old cohort Mark Madden when he got on the phone — while also experimenting with electronic music and DJing at gay dance parties.

If he lost some of his Husker fans along the way, he grabbed them back with 2012’s “Silver Age,” a vicious return to form. “Sunshine Rock,” the fourth entry in this rock rebirth, finds him bashing away with bassist Jason Narducy and Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster on an album with no less than four songs containing the word “sun” in the title. It also includes one of this most reflective songs in the orchestrated “The Final Years.”

The album’s mood is informed in part by his new life as a part-time Berliner. He talks about his daily life there in a short documentary video that accompanies the album release on Friday. Here’s what he had to say in a phone conversation in advance of his show here at Mr. Smalls in Millvale on Feb. 19.

How did you come to be living part-time in Berlin, and what is life like for you there compared to the States?

I’ve been based in San Francisco for 10 years and about three years ago I saw a break in my schedule ahead and I just wanted to have some different experiences, get a fresh perspective on things. San Francisco is great, but I just saw that moment to make a break for myself. I’ve had a history with Berlin for a long time, 33 years, and I had a lot of friends there. I used to visit there quite often when I would have downtime. So, I started spending more time there and decided to get an apartment there, in September 2016. Differences? San Francisco is pretty wild and pretty free in a California way, trying to lead the country forward in a way. Berlin has a real large, important history…and is an anomaly in Germany. It’s very progressive. The last four years, with the Syrian refugees and Brexit, there’s a real interesting energy in Berlin right now. It’s nice to be there, nice to be part of it. Sometimes I feel like I’m part of the problem because of gentrification happening. It’s all kinds of stuff. I could prattle on for quite a while. There’s a lot of differences and I’ve learned a lot from noticing those differences.

Does it inspire you in any different ways, creatively?

Well, the experiences in life are what inform the work. Once I made the conscious effort to sort of embrace the optimism that’s happening around me instead of dwelling on the darkness, when I made that choice to look into the light instead of looking into the shadow, it had everything to do with informing the work, which is trying to enjoy the moments I was having, trying to enjoy the experiences on the record, some of the challenges I was having. It’s definitely the motivator for it. Just in meteorological terms, the summers there are ridiculous because you get so much more sunlight. 10:30 at night in the summer and the sky is still bright. Right now, it’s pretty damn dark.

What was the initial spark for “Sunshine Rock”? It doesn’t sound like a Bob Mould song or album title.

I had been writing for about six months. I had a couple songs that are on the record from before that. Those experiences led to that song and the unbridled optimism in that song. That became the tentpole for the record. That happens a lot with all records. It’s funny, I’m normally a destination-oriented person. With making records, there’s a journey that you start on and if you say, “I am going to write a rock opera about three people, two of which came from broken homes,” that’s a framework that you can write a concept record. For this, it was just a dark versus light and I chose the light, for once. And that song opened up the door to that, and it was like, ‘Yeah, follow that, that’s productive.” And then I make that conscious decision and I’m writing with a destination in mind. That’s journey versus destination.

Songs probably came in waves for you back in the old days. How has that changed for you as you’ve gotten older?

Yeah, when you’re young you have everything to say. And time is endless. But there’s this urgency when you’re young. When I started writing, I could write songs all the time, every day there was something — you know, the world was only 18 years old. “Look at all this wonder.” Time and gravity change the speed at which you move [laughs]. When you get older, it’s looking for new ideas, waiting for inspiration and then trying to find a new way to present it to people, without dwelling on darkness and endings of things too much. It comes in different ways. There are still moments when I hit a streak and write three or four songs in a week that become a cluster of songs on an album. That still happens and I’m always incredibly grateful when those bounties happen, because a lot of times you’re just out there with a hoe, dragging it across the weeds, hoping for something.

A song like “I Fought” has as much energy and urgency as anything you’ve done. Did you foresee being able to do that at this point in your career?

Uh, I didn’t think I was gonna live to this, so that was a bonus [laughs]. At 20, did I think I would make it to 30? I wasn’t sure. When I got to 30, did I think I was going to make it 50? I didn’t know. When I got to 50, I’m like “Can I have more?” The early ’80s was similar but not the same as the times we live in now, at least in terms of American politics and the direction of a country and how we’re letting the world down with poor leadership. These are pretty unique times, but in the ’80s there was a lot to rail against, there was a lot going on with the American government that caused that urgency. There were a lot of us fighting for our lives at that point, literally. And you don’t forget those things and any time that the world starts to tip in that direction, that urgency comes back, maybe. I mean, I love good times, but bad times can really provoke and reawaken that urgency, not that I want that for my work, but you write what you know.

You were always able to relate to your older material, though, right?

Um, I think there’s songs that are still incredibly relevant. I think there are songs I wrote when I was much younger that I don’t identify with any longer. But, a song like “In a Free Land” or a song like “Divide and Conquer,” songs like that are just incredibly relevant to the moment we’re in, yeah, I’ll bring those with me. And songs that remind of the good times, “Makes No Sense at All” or the wonder of “Workbook” — how did I learn that language at that point in my life? — there are pieces. So, this theory, you start a blanket or a shirt or a quilt or a piece of cloth, right, and it has these colors and shapes, and as you move on, you don’t always bring the whole cloth with you but you grab the pretty threads — the colors and textures you like and you make a new cloth out of it. It’s always in there. That’s the thing you get to, if you’ve been doing this your whole life.

Do you hear that intensity coming from younger musicians?

I’m probably more out of touch than I’d like to admit. I will say this. People talk about punk or hardcore and that thing, after hardcore sort of dissipated or reiterated, rave culture was the exact parallel in the ’90s. It was just that idea of music outside of tradition, music for outsiders, and you had to be “in it” to know where it was going on. That kind of movement, and hip-hop, we went through a period in the aughts and part of the teens, music got terribly comfortable, I guess would be the word. And I was working in a different style, a lot of electronic stuff and putting a lot of my energy into DJing and telling stories through other people’s music. I thought club music in the 2000s was pretty solid, until about 2007. Pop music, I wasn’t so sure. Now, I don’t know if I recognize the art form. It’s different from what I grew up with. I think the way people construct music now is completely different. It seems like the creation is more of a singular act than a communal act. The presentation of it may still be communal, but the artform has changed considerably. I think the three of us, what we try to offer people is that if you like that kind of three people playing guitar, bass and drums, and the interaction and the dynamics that happen magically between three people who are tuned in, if you like that kind of music, this is what we do and that's what you should come and see, because that’s our strong suit.

Scott Mervis: smervis@post-gazette.com.

First Published: February 7, 2019, 1:42 p.m.