While his iconic first band Hüsker Dü was known for its aggressive delivery and the breakneck pace of its songs (they didn’t name an album Land Speed Record for nothing), Bob Mould’s solo career has spanned roughly three decades and a number of stylistic shifts along the way. Today we’re ranking the legend’s albums in order of awesomeness.

By 1988, “I was ready to move on to the next part of my life,” Mould wrote in his 2011 memoir, See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody. Gone was the super-distorted, super-compressed buzzsaw-on-metal sound of his previous band’s output; his first album, 1989’s Workbook, replaced it with a cleaner, string-infused sonic approach, more akin to singer-songwriter albums than post-punk singles.

It was not the last time Mould would surprise or challenge his fans. In the early '90s he put together the electric pop trio Sugar, whose two LPs were much beloved by the burgeoning “alternative” audience blown away by Nirvana’s Nevermind. The band only lasted three years, though, after which Mould released rock records made completely on his own, until even that dissatisfied him.  He turned to electronic dance music as a mode of creative expression, before eventually returning to guitar-based rock.

While this list does not include Hüsker Dü releases (fodder, perhaps, for another list), it does encompass studio albums released under his own name, as well as those from Sugar and two of his electronic music projects, Blowoff and Loudbomb. Let’s take a spin through the discography of one of the great rock artists of the last three decades.

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