“I’m getting older,” says rock legend Bob Mould, exhaling a quiet laugh. But at 55, the former Hüsker Dü/Sugar mastermind is aging with creative verve, deep into his third essential era as a singer-songwriter. Patch the Sky, Mould’s radiant 12th solo LP, is his third in four years, extending one of the most prolific streaks in his three-and-a-half-decade career.

His road toward resurgence has been filled with fascinating detours. Following the 1988 collapse of iconic alt-punk act Hüsker Dü, Mould found a second wind with underrated alt-rock act Sugar. But his new millennium résumé has been harder to pin down: dalliances with electronica (LoudBomb’s 2002 release Modulate) and DJ material (Blowoff ) alongside bursts of his trademark heavy, hooky rock. Mould has spent the past couple of decades cashing in on his critical cache, recording whatever style of music he damn well pleases, while redefining his parameters as a songwriter. But as musical trends cycle, with Hüsker Dü and Sugar becoming touchstones for a new crop of rock songwriters, Mould has built unexpected momentum.

The dam broke in 2011. One important step came by glancing backward and retracing his life and career in the acclaimed autobiography he co-authored, See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody. Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl also worked admirably to raise Mould’s profile throughout the year, recruiting him to record guitar and backing vocals on a Foos track, covering Hüsker Dü’s “Never Talking to You Again” as part of a Record Store Day covers LP, and inviting his idol to open tour dates with DJ sets. During some arena shows, Mould even relished the jolt of joining the band onstage.

“I was a huge fan of Hüsker Dü,” Grohl told Mojo. “Their album Zen Arcade is one of the most underrated American rock-and-roll records of all time. And only recently did I realize how much I’ve ripped Bob off for the last 16 years! I met him for the first time last summer and said, ‘You know, I’d be nowhere and nobody without your music, right?’ And he very politely nodded and said, ‘I know.’”

Mould capped off that incredible run, appropriately, in the center spotlight, as Grohl and other notable devotees (including Ryan Adams, The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn and Spoon’s Britt Daniel) united to celebrate his influence that November at a Los Angeles tribute concert. After spending decades as a revered elder statesman, Mould was operating on a grander stage.

Recruiting bassist Jason Narducy (Split Single, Verbow) and drummer Jon Wurster (The Mountain Goats, Superchunk), Mould recorded two slabs of heavy, bare-bones rock: 2012’s Silver Age and 2014’s Beauty & Ruin, a formidable one-two punch that earned his fondest reviews in years.

“We’re having a great run, there’s no doubt about it,” Mould says. “A lot of things conspired at once, moved to the same spot at once—the autobiography, the stuff with Foo Fighters. Jon and Jason and I had toured together in ‘08 and ‘09, and I think my visibility was pretty low at that time, so people didn’t get to see those tours where we were learning the additional current language. Clearly, the three of us know the old language—Hüsker, Sugar, that stuff— real well, but how to build on it? I think with Silver Age and Beauty & Ruin, it was pretty clear I’d found a way to write to that strength.”

Even with his career at a new peak, Mould’s personal life was in disarray—though he chooses to keep quiet on the details. “It was pretty fucked up,” he says, referencing a particularly difficult stretch in 2014. “I didn’t really want to be around people at all. I felt like people close to me could verify that I was acting strange and lashing out. I had a lot of personal setbacks as I was out touring Beauty & Ruin. I’ve had a lot of loss in my life—people passing, people getting sick, people leaving. That’s life, but it really fucks with your head, and you’re not sure what’s what. I know myself well enough to know that’s a good time to get out of life—get out of the way and go home, stay away from people so I don’t do any more damage.”

Attempting to heal “physically and spiritually and emotionally,” he sequestered himself from friends and family in his San Francisco home, pouring his emotional trauma into songs over a seven-month writing span. “Life goes on, work goes on,” he says. “But when work is done and I go home, I just sort of sit with myself. And that’s what the process is, that’s what this songwriting thing is. It’s not like being an architect where the plans for the kitchen are due next week so the contractor can start. It’s sitting every day with my thoughts, with my tools, and making music. That’s the therapy of it, I guess, and that’s the way I get to the core of it.

“I think we all have those moments where a lot of unfortunate things happen to people in a close stretch of time. It’s nothing special. We all go through it, and that’s how I deal with it: I get out of traffic and write music.”

Both a musical and literal nomad, Mould moved from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco in 2009, and the city’s unique aura informed some of his material around that time. But the isolated writing process of Patch the Sky yielded more intimate results, mainly reflecting the troubled contours of his own psyche. “With Patch the Sky, my search would have yielded these results pretty much anywhere. I think that speaks to literally how isolated I was when I was working on the record. From the beginning of writing the record to now, they’ve installed a new locker room at my gym. That’s about all I know.”

Writing almost every day, Mould wound up with 50 fully formed musical ideas and a pile of loose words and lyrical concepts. He initially considered crafting a fast, hard-hitting punk LP, inspired by a famously vehement Late Show performance, where the trio’s din literally shook dust from the rafters. (“Nice drums, by the way,” deadpanned then-host David Letterman.) But the puzzle pieces slowly merged into place, with Mould pairing bleak (or in the case of epic sing-along “The End of Things,” apocalyptic) lyrics with an array of mostly sunny sonic styles.

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That light-dark contrast runs throughout his songbook, dating back to his time with Hüsker Dü. But he’s sharpened that skill over the years, using classic pop tricks to lure in listeners who might otherwise grimace at the heavy subject matter.

“They’re pretty simplistic and easy to remember,” he says of his melodies, high lighting the surging chorus of “Hold On,” an outlier in the writing process that germinated in late 2013 as a “slow, pounding acoustic” track. “I’ve always been a big fan of the classic pop hook. Because once you get the hook stuck in their head, they’ll listen over and over, and eventually, the words get in. That’s always been the contrast for me: the beauty of the hook and sometimes the heaviness of the words. That’s always been a real foundation of my work.”

But as much as Mould loves the intricacies of rock songcraft, he finds the process more difficult in an era of pervasive plagiarism accusations—where even vague melodic similarities can result in a lawsuit.

“I always have that fear. I’ll write a song, and I’ll think it sounds so familiar, like, ‘Oh, my god, did I lift this from somewhere?’” he says. “That’s no way to live! And if the music business is going to act like this in its last dying breaths, come on… Just fucking tell stories. It’s a dangerous situation with this stuff. [The 2015 Marvin Gaye/Robin Thicke case] is the one I was really upset about. [Those songs] technically have nothing to do with each other besides a cowbell and maybe a groove. Those early Prince records would be in grave danger if you applied that to everybody—this idea of copping a feel. No! Back off!”

Mould’ in a strange position these days. Hüsker followers have blown up his distinctive approach for an arena setting, while Mould himself remains far from a household name. Patch the Sky centerpiece “You Say You,” with its snarling vocal lines, inverted chord shapes and wall-of-guitars production, recalls the bombast of Foo Fighters classic “Everlong”— and then you realize that it just sounds like trademark Mould.

Patch the Sky is filled with such moments of intense clarity, like the chugging “Voices in My Head” and the climactic “Monument,” which finds Mould singing about a crumbling world held in place by music. (“Walls of sound keep the sky from falling down.”) “It’s a sort of a commemoration of living, a commemoration of death,” he says. “And some people argue that monuments are more a monument to the fabricator than the subject. That line is such an easy one— it literally is what it says. That din that I make, those voices in my head that just keep going and going. Then, at the end of the record, that’s how it ends.”

Mould is a songwriter in the old-fashioned sense, crafting classic pop chord changes that deliver what he calls “the chemical chorus”—but the skills of Wurster and Narducy have forced him to step up his game. They’ve formed the perfect power trio, both onstage and in the studio, but Mould’s realistic that this ideal set-up might not be permanent. “These three records really feel like a package,” he says. “Both of those guys are so gifted and so in-demand—not only with their own stuff, but they also work on a lot of different projects. I’m always grateful we get time to play together. We travel well together. We know how to give each other the right amount of space. We have the right amount of closeness. It’s incredible.

“I’ve worked in situations before, like in Hüsker, where healthy competition can yield amazing results. That was in my twenties, when I had a lot of fight in me and a lot of chaos. And you hear that in those records. I can’t do that magic again because I’m not 20! I’ve found this other way to build a band and give everybody equal room to shine, but it’s sort of a singular notion and a collective presentation. Music isn’t like sports so much, but it really is about your strategy, and when you find something that works, you try to take care of it and take it as far as you can.”

Unlike most rock gods, who either wither into irrelevance or peter out with awkward reinventions, Mould’s only grown tougher—and wiser—as a songwriter over the years. Moshing to the ramped-up riffs of an anthem like “Losing Time,” it’s easy to forget the man’s mortal, let alone in his fifties.

“The touring gets a little harder each time,” he admits. “My voice has a lot of miles. I have a lot of holes punched on my screaming card. It’s a reality, you know? Physically, we all do a fuck-lot, literally training like we’re training for baseball or football season. People are out running miles a day, lifting weights, doing yoga. I’m not as young as I used to be, and I don’t want it to break down all the time. All that’s going on as far as, ‘Is this it?’ You never know. I don’t know. We love doing this, but it’s gotta look and sound right. I don’t want it to look bad, and I don’t want it to fall apart.”

One thing he’s confident about is that, despite a recent rebranding of the band’s online merch store, he’s not interested in the cheap nostalgia of a Hüsker Dü reunion.

“I totally get it,” he says. “But I don’t want a Smiths reunion. Why would you push people who have clearly moved on and have their own lives back into something they don’t want to do together? It’s like, ‘Remember you dated that girl for six years and then broke her heart? Well, here she is again. And for my benefit, I want to see you all make out.’ People don’t do that in real life. I’ve got the best band in the world right now. No offense to Hüsker Dü—that was the best band in the world when I was there. It’s like with cities: With New York City, I go, ‘Fuckin’ New York City—it was the best when I fuckin’ lived there. Now it’s just a bunch of Starbucks.’ That’s what we do as people—it was always best when we were there.”

Mould has no idea what comes next, but he’s content with the unexpected. It liberates him. “I think sometimes you can do too much of the same thing over and over, and you’re not taking yourself to a new place,” he says. “These are the battles. These are great battles to have.”