REFUSED - Backengrillen

Refused have broken up once again. It's a saga that began back in 1991 (when a record capable of changing your life seemed to come out every week), started by four friends from Umeå, Sweden, a university town of roughly ninety thousand inhabitants. The hardcore punk band met its first end as early as 1998, right in the middle of a run of shows in the United States. Reformed in 2012, Refused carried on until 2025, putting the final seal on things last December, after a farewell tour that culminated in three shows in their hometown, the last of which took place on December 21st. But it's now clear that some of them just can't quite let go: three of the four members recently holed up in the studio with fellow townsman Mats Gustafsson (quite the lively little town, apparently!), emerging with a debut album that shares its name with the group itself, Backengrillen.

The voice belongs to Dennis Lyxzén, the rhythm section is in the expert hands of Magnus Flagge (bass) and David Sandström (drums), while Mats Gustafsson takes care of everything else (saxophones, flutes, electronic debris). The four, who describe themselves as an antifascist and antiracist collective, deliver music aimed against every form of authoritarianism: violent, provocative, avant-garde, dissonant, and heavily charged with political meaning, a brand of free form jazz (some call it death-jazz, others detect doom elements) defiled by noise and crossbred with a savage tribalism. Call it, if you like, jazzcore. Songs torn out with no regard for compromise, moving forward relentlessly, fairly extended yet not overly complex in structure, elevated by the sheer skill of the extraordinary musicians involved, capable of making you feel the groove even in the most brutal, harrowing moments.

"A Hate Inferior", which opens the tracklist, stands out for its sinister, yet never truly off-putting pace, building through gradual accumulation until it fully detonates, with Lyxzén's inhuman screams used as if they were just another instrument. An improvisational piece that immediately sets the album's dramatic mood, confirmed by the following "Dör för långsamt", a dark track with lacerating horns and a phrase repeated endlessly, "Dör för långsamt", which translates as "dies too slowly". There are no guitars, but who's going to notice? Guitars are also absent on the track that comes closest to Refused's back catalogue, the one that most clearly shows a certain "punk attitude", "Repeater II", the most "rounded" one, the most "song"-like.

"Backengrillen", on the other hand, is the album's most meditative chapter, dominated by flutes in its first part, a mournful pagan procession that slowly leads toward either ascension or total self-destruction, before "Socialism Or Barbarism" smashes everything to rubble, emerging out of droning static, with vocal lines recalling Iggy Pop, before finally drowning in an inexorable blanket of noise. Rubble, just like the one pictured on the cover art, conceived to define the project's post-atomic aesthetic.

"Backengrillen" is an anguished sound, a manifesto of creative freedom, the desire to translate into music a feeling that by now is clear to everyone: something in the world isn't working the way it should. In Northern Europe fears are running high, in a region squeezed between the expansionist ambitions of Russia and the United States. The melting of the Arctic ice is opening up new sea routes for international trade, routes that the world's great powers intend to fight over and control. But it's not just a European issue: there's Iran, there's the Gaza Strip, there's Venezuela, there are so many conflicts that never make it onto TV. That's why the cacophonous symphonies with no apparent way out dreamed up by Backengrillen feel so painfully relevant, born in the space of just a few hours, the offspring of chaos and of an expressive urgency that couldn't wait even one more minute. A second album is reportedly already in the works, probably more "considered" than this debut, though that's not necessarily a good thing...

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01/02/2026