Hüsker Dü’s “Flip Your Wig” isn’t so much a song as a status update from a world before social media. The excitable opening track from the namesake 1985 album is an on-the-ground dispatch from the eye of the hype storm that engulfed the Minneapolis trio as they transitioned from SST hardcore antagonists to Warner Brothers-backed alt-rock trailblazers. The song marked the rare occasion where both principal songwriters—guitarist/vocalist Bob Mould and singing drummer Grant Hart—shared lead vocals, despite their notoriously thorny relationship. But even at their most optimistic, their lyrics dripped with cynicism. “Sunday section gave us a mention/Grandma’s freakin’ out over the attention,” Hart sings, excited that his days of sleeping on floors are coming to an end, yet wary of the hangers-on and opportunists that emerge from the woodwork when you’re crowned the next big thing. “Long distance on the other end/Says I need them for a friend/No matter what I choose/I’m the one they wanna use.”

If “Flip Your Wig” provides a two-and-a-half-minute snapshot of what it was like to be in Hüsker Dü in 1985, a new Numero Group box set gives us the director’s cut view of a band that, at the time, seemed unstoppable—a term that applies equally to their relentless onstage attack, their prodigious rate of musical output, and the great strides they made as songwriters with each new release. Between the summer of 1984 and winter of 1987, Hüsker Dü released five albums that perfected the balance of melody and noise that would define indie rock for decades to come. 1985: The Miracle Year drops us right in the middle of this phenomenally productive stretch with two discs of live material that constitute not just a generous gesture of fan service, but a crucial act of restorative justice for a band whose legacy has long been ill served by their studio albums.

Hüsker Dü just might be the most powerful rock band with the chintziest-sounding back catalogue, a cache of timeless songs entombed in dated low-budget production. Even as Hüsker Dü were expanding hardcore’s monochromatic palette with liberal splashes of ’60s pop, folk, and psychedelia, their recordings were still confined to quick ’n’ dirty DIY dimensions, with Mould’s omnipresent guitar squall routinely overwhelming Hart and bassist Greg Norton’s battering-ram momentum. And even after the band cut ties with Black Flag producer Glen “Spot” Lockett and seized control of the studio console from Flip Your Wig onward, the greater clarity and texture on Hüsker Dü’s later records still came at the expense of the rhythm section. While there’s no denying the intoxicating allure of all that distortion and the resilient melodies holding their ground within it, listening to a Hüsker Dü album can feel a bit like hearing the world’s loudest band trapped inside of a soda can—and in Hart, you had one of most irrepressible drummers of his generation playing on what sounded like a kit made of wet sand bags.

Of course, that’s nothing a proper remastering campaign couldn’t potentially remedy, but where peers like the Replacements and Meat Puppets have enjoyed multiple rounds of reissues, Hüsker Dü’s SST masters remain shackled in a long-standing legal limbo. As a result, any Hüsker Dü archival undertaking has had to dance around the most fruitful period of the band’s career: The Warner-released 1994 live album The Living End compiled performances from the band’s final tour in 1987; Numero Group’s 2017 box set Savage Young Dü keyed in on the band’s pre-SST origins.

But 1985: The Miracle Year might be the closest we’ll ever get to a Tim (Let It Bleed Edition)-style treatment of Hüsker Dü’s imperial phase. Its first disc, Minnesota Miracle, features a professional 24-track mobile-unit recording of a January 30, 1985 homecoming date at Minneapolis’ First Avenue, held two weeks after the release of New Day Rising. (In interviews at the time, Mould hinted they were prepping an official live album/VHS release that, alas, never saw the light of day.) If you came of age after Hüsker Dü broke up, it could be hard to square the band’s reputation as a Category 5 force of nature with their tinny-sounding recordings; certainly, there’s a sizable contingent of Mould fans who prefer the punchier, more polished records he’d go on to make with (the recently reunited) Sugar in the ’90s. But if Hüsker Dü have been relegated to one of those “you had to be there, man” bands, Minnesota Miracle is your time-machine ticket to experience the band at peak ferocity; from the moment Hart unloads the carpet-bombing backbeat of New Day Rising’s mantric opening track, the legend of Hüsker Dü starts to feel a lot more real.

Hüsker Dü’s rapid evolution in this period is best measured by what isn’t included on the First Avenue setlist. A little over six months before the show, the trio had released Zen Arcade, the groundbreaking conceptual double-album that catapulted them from punk-zine fodder to four-star reviews in Rolling Stone. But at First Avenue, they played just two Zen Arcade tracks in a 23-song set—and that’s not just because the band were making room for the fresh New Day Rising material. At this point, Hüsker Dü already came armed with a number of songs from what would become Flip Your Wig, which hadn’t even been recorded yet. But as Minnesota Miracle demonstrates, the best way to acclimate your fans to unfamiliar songs is to play everything so blindingly fast, in rapid succession, that the audience won’t know what hit ’em. Over the course of its hour-long runtime, the set offers no stage-banter breathers, no tuning breaks, no mercy.

The party line on Hüsker Dü is that they were a hardcore band who turned into a pop group, but Minnesota Miracle captures a moment when they were still playing their pop songs as if they were hardcore songs—even the jolliest jingles here, like Mould’s “Hate Paper Doll” and Hart’s “Books About UFOs,” swing with the bruising force of a hockey body-check, while Mould’s Flying V fuzz hovers above like radioactive smog, blurring his riffs, solos, and feedback into a single, sinus-clearing frequency. At the same time, they could make a bitter hardcore screed taste like bubblegum: “Divide and Conquer” sees Mould barking out 10 consecutive melody-free verses that read like a distant early warning of today’s technocratic dystopia, yet the song’s chiming, circular riff exudes the mirth and merriment of a ’60s psych-pop standard. But when Hüsker Dü start trotting out actual ’60s psych-pop standards—during a late-set dip into the Byrds and Beatles canons—they’re not so much honoring the past as drawing a road map to the future, with volcanic versions of “Eight Miles High,” “Ticket to Ride,” and “Helter Skelter” (featuring a vocal cameo from Soul Asylum’s Dave Pirner) that initiate a proto-shoegaze fusion of acidic melody and narcotic noise.

The second disc, More Miracles, unearths another 20 soundboard recordings captured on the band’s U.S. and European treks throughout 1985, and, remarkably, none of them overlap with the First Avenue set. True to prolific form, the ’85 tours saw the Hüskers already test-driving songs that would end up on their 1986 Warner Brothers debut, Candy Apple Grey, and the early versions of “Sorry Somehow” and “Eiffel Tower High” featured here still exhibit a serrated edge and scrappy intensity that would get buffed in the studio. Likewise, the album’s centerpiece acoustic lament, “Hardly Getting Over It,” is presented in embryonic grungegaze form, and while it still stands out as The Slow Song in the Hüsker repertoire, the decibel levels were up to the band’s usual skull-splitting standards.

The piecemeal nature of More Miracles makes it less an all-consuming, sensory-obliterating experience than the Minnesota Miracle disc, with some selections bearing the hiss of a bootleg cassette. But we do get to hear a lot more audience reaction and interaction to remind us that, for all the emotional unrest and hearing loss their music engendered, and all the simmering tension baked into the Mould/Hart dynamic, Hüsker Dü were also having a lot of fun onstage. And they would never sound more jovial than on the future “Don’t Want to Know If You Are Lonely” B-side “All Work and No Play,” a topsy-turvy rocker that swipes an old saw from Jack Torrance’s typewriter in The Shining and spins it into a cheerful participatory chant that they ride out for seven minutes, by which point the drunks in the crowd have taken control of the mic. It’s oddly appropriate that Hüsker Dü would find their muse in a character whose writer’s block drives him into a homicidal rage—it wouldn’t be long before Mould and Hart’s competitive creative dynamic would curdle into interpersonal dysfunction, bringing one of the most industrious bands in ’80s indie rock to an ugly end. But 1985: The Miracle Year bottles up all the nervous, euphoric energy that precipitated the burnout, making all that work sound like play.