By now, Bob Mould knows what he’s good at.

For going on 40 years, he has fronted rock bands — first, in the ’80s, as a punk with simmering pop ambitions in Hüsker Dü, and later with Sugar and as a solo artist — often shrouding his enduringly bleak worldview with disorienting speed, screams and guitar fuzz.

On the new “Patch the Sky,” his third back-to-basics album for Merge Records since 2012, Mr. Mould, 55, has boiled down an old formula to its purest form: tight, sharp musings on aging, fizzled relationships and death that are melodic enough to sound like songs of victory. “I wanna run away/Can I disintegrate?” he sings on “Hands Are Tied,” achieving catharsis in under two minutes. “Where’s my freedom?/There’s no freedom.”

Mr. Mould credits a 2011 tribute show to his past work led by Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters with refocusing his songwriting after a period of experimenting with electronica and with D.J.-ing. (He also released a memoir that year.) “In a funny way, it gave me the O.K. to sort of steal from myself a little bit and not feel that need to reinvent again or to go down a different path for the sake of going down it,” he said. “Everything led back to the core guitar-bass-drums, simpler pop songs, more direct.”

Mr. Mould, who remains steady in his countercultural inclinations, spoke recently about the state of punk and learning to keep things straightforward on the phone from San Francisco, where he has lived since 2009. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.