It’s been a tough few years for Bob Mould, the power trio standard-bearer, college rock Founding Father, and legendary architect of Sugar and Hüsker Dü. He spent the better part of the 2000s making records that variously wrestled with middle age and the deaths of his parents—each album robust and cathartic, each one understandably introspective and glum. Finally deciding he’d endured just about enough of American life’s callous indignities, Mould decamped to Berlin where he realized just a little too late that the winters are long and grim. All of which makes it perplexing to find a brand new Bob Mould album bearing the cheerful label Sunshine Rock, with not one but four of its songs celebrating the sun in their titles. You might justifiably wonder if the famous sadsack has either finally snapped or is simply yanking our chains, a theory lent some credence by a late-album folk ditty called “Camp Sunshine,” where Mould pines for the halcyon days spent at his childhood summer camp. But its idyll is not a put-on, and neither is it a retreat into nostalgia: Rather, it heralds a real emotional sea change. Sunshine Rock is a statement of joyful intent from a man who’s made the decision to abide hope, to champion perseverance as a value unto itself, and to take up gladness and gratitude as potent all-natural mental health supplements. Mould sings these buoyant new songs not as someone who’s deluding himself, but as someone who’s weathered enough dark times to be convinced (and convincing) that brighter ones must be coming. Maybe the Camp Sunshine he sings about is a memory or maybe it’s a poetic invention, but either way it’s an oasis, a place for refuge and realignment. What these new songs suppose is: Perhaps the true Camp Sunshine is the inner Camp Sunshine.

His updated outlook comes with a rejiggered delivery vehicle; Sunshine Rock is built on the electric thrills Mould has always championed but bejeweled with a few flourishes from his new silver linings playbook. Mould’s allegiance is to rock and roll the way its framers intended it to be played, meaning short songs with clear melodies, played loud, fast, and with boisterous abandon. Here he slashes and burns through a dozen elastic, brambly earworms, rocket-fueled by the mighty wallop of the Superchunck rhythm section. It’s vivacious enough to sound like the whole thing was cut live to tape just this morning, and classicist enough that it could pass for an unearthed relic from the 60s, 70s, 80s, or 90s. The album’s one opulent gesture is the inclusion of an 18-piece string section, appearing on select songs not so much to dramatize them as to add ballast and heft—cosmic swirl on the title track, panoramic denouement on “Western Sunset.” The orchestral festooning never distracts from the ferocity of Mould’s overdriven power pop, nor from the music’s thrum, crunch, crackle, and howl. He’s still a purveyor of premium-grade bubblegum—check “Sunny Love Song,” so breezy and buoyant and instantly memorable that it actually earns its lark of a title—but Mould’s love language is one of ragged riffs and clattering cymbals. Here he speaks it fluently, dealing out hard stuff aplenty: The pulverizing din of “Thirty Dozen Roses” makes it a headbanger’s ball, while “I Fought” is a banshee-wail punk anthem. A late-album cover of Shocking Blue’s “Send Me a Postcard” is played with enough withering, in-the-red intensity to strip the thread off a screw. Maybe this marriage of garage rock ruckus and symphonic décor is exactly what Stephen Malkmus had in mind with his admonishment to sparkle hard.

For Mould, hopefulness isn’t a feeling but an active verb, a prophetic witness that requires constant engagement and daily reaffirmation. There are hints throughout Sunshine Rock that positivity is still a bit ill-fitting for him: Listen to the tightly-coiled “What Do You Want Me to Do,” where spring-loaded resentments explode like booby traps, detonated by his venomous snarl. More reflective is “The Final Years,” an end-of-the-road memoir that could easily have slipped into the Johnny Cash/Rick Rubin repertoire. Here, the singer laments his “years of misplaced rage,” and reckons with the daunting task of setting his mind to nobler things in whatever time he has left. (“What will we cherish in the final years?” he asks, clear-eyed.)  There’s a lot of fury that snakes through these songs—in “Irrational Poison,” the narrator is desperate not to drown in his own toxicity— but that just makes the declarations of open-heartedness that much more affecting; while some men just grow jaded as they make it to the top of the mountain, Mould sounds like a guy who’s seen just how much of a dead-end bitterness can be. And so “Sunshine Rock,” the album’s keynote, is the sound of clouds parting, Mould ably playing the romantic hero who swoops in on his white horse and saves the day. (“They don’t love you like I love you,” he pledges.) And in “Lost Faith,” he posits despair as a kind of waywardness, but love the lighthouse beckoning us home: “We all lose faith from time to time/ You better find your way back now.” You might call it a song of experience: The testimony of someone who’s been deep in the shit and doesn’t claim to have all the answers—but he knows enough to know hope.