9 revelations in the new Hüsker Dü and Replacements box sets

They both called Minnesota home but had been touring like crazy. They were both about to graduate from indie to corporate labels. Their songwriters were coming into their own. They hadn’t yet started falling apart.

Those are the stories Hüsker Dü and the Replacements share in new box sets coming out this month. Each culled from the mid-1980s, the multi-LP collections won’t make you rethink these legendary Twin Cities bands, but they will teach you a thing or two about them.

Hüsker Dü’s “1985: The Miracle Year” is the more noteworthy of the two sets. From the collectors-oriented Chicago reissue label Numero Music Group, it’s only the third batch of unreleased material from the noisy melody makers issued this century, after two collections that focused on their baby-band years. This new four-LP set is all heyday-era Hüskers material.

The Replacements have been much more prolific of late, finding new spins on their old catalog through Rhino/Warner Records. Their sixth expanded collection in eight years, “Let It Be: Deluxe Edition” — available as a four-LP vinyl or three-CD bundle — could be of great interest since it focuses on their most influential record.

Here are some of the lessons from each collection.

The “miracle” of Hüsker Dü was how hard and fast the band worked. “Miracle Year” is made up entirely of live recordings from the year the legendarily loud trio with competing lead singers/songwriters Bob Mould and the late Grant Hart released two of its best studio albums in a nine-month span, “New Day Rising” and “Flip Your Wig.” The group also played about 100 gigs across the country and in Europe around all that writing and recording.

Discs 1 and 2 are taken from the “New Day Raising” release party at First Avenue in January 1985, for which the band enlisted Twin/Tone Records’ mobile recording truck to capture high-quality audio. The third and fourth LPs are from various other shows that year, much of them recorded from the board by sound engineer Lou Giordano. As newly remastered old punk-rock tapes go, these sound pretty great.

Paul Westerberg was ready for “Let It Be.” It’s fun hearing the Replacements frontman mess around with lyrics and wing it through some of his best-known songs on other box sets. On this collection, he sounds unusually prepared and focused even in alternate versions of “Unsatisfied,” “Androgynous,” “Favorite Thing” and “Answering Machine” — all of which sound pretty close to the final tracks we know so well.

One exception to that familiarity is a newly unearthed test run of “Gary’s Got a Boner,” which is quite a mess — and a hoot.

The other Replacements were on point, too. The legends and real-life accounts of the band’s drunken tomfoolery from this era are well-known, but you wouldn’t know it from the bonus material on this deluxe edition. Even the tacked-on live recording — a rough-quality audience tape from the Cubby Bear in Chicago in August 1984 — shows the quartet operating with relatively tight chemistry, and with fiery and focused contributions from late guitarist Bob Stinson (who would be kicked out of the band a year and a half later).

The Hüskers played much cooler cover songs than the ’Mats. The Hüsker Dü box set includes two Beatles covers, “Ticket to Ride” and “Helter Skelter” — the latter a brutal take featuring Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum (that night’s opener) — plus Donovan and Byrds tunes that the band had previously recorded. The Replacements’ collection, conversely, includes studio takes on Canadian teen idols the DeFranco Family (“Heartbeat, It’s a Lovebeat”), breezy California pickers the Grass Roots (“Temptation Eyes”), and, of course, Kiss, as heard on the original LP (“Black Diamond”). There’s no question whose picks would be favored by most record nerds.

Chicks dug “Let It Be.” In the deluxe edition’s new liner notes, music scribe and musician Elizabeth Nelson notes how sharply songs like the tender ode “Sixteen Blue,” “Unsatisfied” and, of course, “Androgynous” marked the turning away of the “indelibly, traditionally macho” sounds of early ’80s U.S. punk rock. Nelson writes: “In form and function, the Replacements were the ultimate rebuke to masculine punk, and ‘Let It Be’ is, at its core, a record for girls. Who is more of an outsider and more socially disdained than a woman?” Not sure where “Gary” fits in with all that, but it’s a deep, new appreciation of the record.

The Replacements may be reaching the bottom of the archival barrel. While recent box sets centering on the “Tim” and “Don’t Tell a Soul” albums offered a lot of revelatory bonus material, the extras on this outstretched “Let It Be” set are unremarkable. A lot of the best outtakes have already been heard on previous reissues. And the audio quality on the Cubby Bear recording is subpar, even by the low standards of a band that put out a collectible live cassette called “The [Expletive] Hits the Fans.”

The Hüskers should do more. After a decadeslong standstill in culling their archives — partly due to disputes with old label SST, and to their own disagreements — Mould and Norton are finally opening up the vaults more following Hart’s death from cancer in 2017. A lot of the tape unearthed for “Miracle Year” was feared lost in a fire at Hart’s South St. Paul home in 2011. We also lost the band’s longtime archivist Terry Katzman in 2019. So it truly seems miraculous to finally hear this stuff, and it would only be fitting to keep it coming.

Release: Friday.

Order: numerogroup.com

Hometown celebration: 7-10 p.m. Thu., Grumpy’s Bar, 2200 NE. 4th St., free, with DJ-ing by Greg Norton and Lori Barbero.

Order: themats.lnk.to/libd