Refused

In 1998, punk is on the covers of the biggest music magazines, and not just those. The California scene led by Green Day and Offspring has blown up, and a new standard of rock song can rival r'n'b, britpop and boyband/girlband hits on the US and European charts. But the hardcore scene, from which the new wave of punk rock flooding the mainstream originates, is still a niche. While the mainstream press focuses on the fashion phenomenon and pop appeal of bands with baggy pants and skateboards in tow, the harder-edged acts form a landscape known only to hardcore devotees, who pour almost all their listening into this scene and share venues, reference points and, in some cases, even life choices with their favourite musicians. Chicago's Victory Records, in particular, is a totem for the faction chasing the most aggressive, mosh-pit-ready sound: fans in tune above all with the more "physical" side of hardcore aesthetics, and largely untouched by the cultural claims often associated with the genre. In the scene's slang, they're called meatheads (in Italian, a similar term is "palestrati"), and the sound they favour is a muscular metalcore with no melodic hooks.

It's from this milieu, perhaps the last one you'd expect it from, that a band of total outsiders emerges, destined to change the course of underground hardcore punk forever, bringing it to the attention of listeners whose contact with the scene was limited, at best, to landmark records from more than a decade earlier. By the time the album that will shake everything up comes out, the Swedish band Refused are no longer on Victory and have largely left behind the Americanised sound of their early days. They're also a band on borrowed time, one that will call it quits without even finishing the album's tour. Then again, the genre's past and present interest them very little. Right from the album's hugely ambitious title, they make it clear: what they're looking at is only the punk of the future.

More punk than punk: hardcore from its origins to the need for a reinvention

Hardcore punk was born in the late 1970s as an extreme take on punk rock, representing a more aggressive, faster and more extreme version of it. If punk was already at odds with the system (both society at large and, more narrowly, the music industry), hardcore positions itself as a radical alternative to it: either in outright opposition or, in terms of sensibility and values, simply alien to it. The fact that an overwhelming majority of hardcore's landmark releases came out independently crystallises this stance well, stubbornly and proudly outside and against the grain. This, however, is just the tip of the iceberg: at its peak, hardcore punk could count on a whole run of dedicated publications, themselves fiercely amateur, as well as its own circuit of venues, its own way of dressing, its own way of dancing. It's a world apart, for a long time a well-kept secret of the underground.

Minor Threat, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, Bad Brains — all founding fathers of hardcore aesthetics, and all American — reject, at least in their works most influential on the style's development, punk's openness to other traditions: more immediate, visceral, raw, deafening and essentially unpalatable even to those who, perhaps via a "London Calling", had ended up swallowing a bit of punk too. Melody, which in punk remains present even in its most ramshackle and gut-level incarnations, becomes a secondary matter in hardcore. At least until the spirit of hardcore punk, its expressive urgency, opens up to pop songwriting in the era of Hüsker Dü and Bad Religion, a prelude to the success the more melodic school would enjoy in the following decade.

Born in the United States, the new style quickly takes root in the UK, Canada and Europe too, Italy included. As early as the start of the 1980s, a range of national scenes had turned hardcore punk into a style effectively adapted across many Western cities, its spread aided by cultural affinities and by opposition to an idea of society whose distortions must have stirred a similarly urgent need for expression even among people thousands of miles apart. Alongside the spread of an increasingly overpowering capitalism, musicians vent their anger at an economic and social system that can turn terribly unjust.

Predictably, given the intensity of the music and the scorching aesthetic on offer, hardcore punk isn't destined to last long in its first incarnation: in 1986 Dead Kennedys and Black Flag break up, while other acts head in different directions, some toward metal, others toward the broader world of alternative and independent rock. The summer of 1985, which would go down in history as the Revolution Summer, brings with it a string of new names that will fall into categories like post-hardcore and emo-core, which will gradually establish themselves as schools of their own, increasingly distant from the core of the community they came from. By the end of the decade the scene is split among different strands of the hardcore ethos, while genres like metal and hip-hop become ever more ubiquitous. The metalcore of bands like Converge carries the idea of hardcore into the 1990s, alongside the mainstream explosion driven by the likes of Green Day, Offspring and Rancid.

By the end of the millennium, hardcore is a microcosm of local scenes, cross-pollinations and reinterpretations. Not much is left of the original spirit — that of pushing punk to extremes and rebelling against its tendency to evolve into something more nuanced and complex: the metal that hardcore once tried to oppose has often been folded into its compositional language, the rift with the music industry has been mended thanks to hugely commercially successful albums, and the sense of social danger that a band like Black Flag once conveyed has been diluted by dozens of harmless bands, far removed from the fiercely antagonistic spirit of the early 1980s. Not just hardcore punk, but punk as a whole, seem desperately in need of a reinvention, one that preserves the spirit of old while avoiding any attachment to the past, to the classics: there's nothing more punk, more hardcore, than refusing to bow to the masterpieces of ten or twenty years earlier and offering up something once again alien, urgent, fast and aggressive.

A band to get out of town: Refused from formation to masterpiece

On vocals Dennis Lyxzén, already a veteran of Step Forward, on drums David Sandström, on guitar Pär Hansson and on bass Jonas Lindgren: Refused were born in Umeå, in northern Sweden, as a quartet with the simple aim of playing out-of-town shows and cutting a 7". Kristofer Steen replaced Hansson even before the debut album for Swedish label Burning Heart Records, "This Just Might Be… The Truth" (1994). It's a collection of a dozen tracks recorded at deafening volume, as best summed up by "Pump The Brakes", with its alarming political message. Working from a template still tied to hardcore's founders, but also influenced by their American contemporaries, Refused already manage a somewhat personal spin on the sound on this debut: "5th Freedom", opened by a menacing bass line, is unstable musical matter that fuses early Minor Threat with post-core elements that keep breaking down and reassembling the arrangement; "Strength" opens with an orchestra of feedback and proceeds at a sludge pace worthy of Melvins. The EP "Everlasting", also from 1994, partly signals a move towards metal and partly reaffirms the band's restlessness.

Refused hadn't written their classics yet, but something in their approach to hardcore already demanded attention: the unstable balance of the songs, the borrowings from other extreme rock styles, and lyrics set ablaze with political messages (in contrast with the apathy of many American bands with a comparable sound) all seem to confirm that a genuine hardcore heart beats within them, without this meaning a slavish rehash of what had already been heard in the Eighties. In 1996 the band, now with guitarist Jon Brännström replacing bassist Lindgren, released the far more ambitious "Songs To Fan The Flames Of Discontent", issued in the US by Victory Records. Heavily influenced by metal and marked by the devastating scream unleashed by singer Dennis Lyxzén, it's an explosion of power fit to blow your hair back.

The opener "Rather Be Dead" immediately signals a change of approach, recasting their earlier defiance within a hardcore-metal hybrid built as an exercise in tension and eruption, in a style reminiscent of the schizoid instability of Frodus. On tracks like "Hook, Line and Sinker", "Crusader Of Hopelessness" and "Last Minute Pointer" the songs unfold through a constant stream of detours, slowdowns and restarts, while others, like "Return To The Closet", focus mainly on covering the distance between subdued and deafening, and still others push toward a more direct, incendiary hardcore punk.

The limitation of "Songs To Fan The Flames Of Discontent" is that it essentially stays within the boundaries of the hardcore scene of its time, a scene already well used to metallic injections and overdoses of tension and power. The time was ripe to move beyond the tradition and stylistic limits of hardcore in general, toward a manifesto album that would present itself as revolutionary starting from its very title.

Alongside the release of "The E.P. Compilation" (1997), which gathers rarities and hints at some of the developments soon to come (it includes a cover of "Voodoo People" by Prodigy!), and "The Demo Compilation" (1997), came the deal with Epitaph, the label founded by Brett Gurewitz of Bad Religion. A label whose name was inspired by King Crimson and which, thanks to the success in those years of NOFX, Offspring, Pennywise and Rancid, had plenty of money to spend. Finally, it was time to unleash their revolution.

The Shape Of Punk To Come: 12 hardcore explosions

The full title, "The Shape Of Punk To Come: A Chimerical Bombination In 12 Bursts", already says a lot about an ambitious album that's hard to pin down. On one hand, a brazen nod to one of jazz's great masterpieces, "The Shape Of Jazz To Come" (1959) by Ornette Coleman, a founding album of free jazz and of a whole new way of thinking about music. On the other, a subtitle promising a dozen "chimerical bursts", unprecedented combinations of stylistic elements ready to detonate in all their power and aggression.

What had often remained just an intention on the second album finally comes to fruition: hardcore punk keeps its original spirit while reinventing itself, thanks to injections not only of metal but also of jazz, electronic music and much more. Without betraying the urgency, aggression, power and conflict essential to the very idea of hardcore, the songs become adventurous explorations straddling genres, styles and moods. The revolution planned by Refused takes the shape of an impetuous flow of centrifugal impulses, kept from flying apart into a thousand pieces only by the clarity of the vision behind it and the exceptional solidity of the songs on the tracklist.

The new punk envisioned by Refused is, in short, at the same time also a new, hyper-mutant form of progressive rock. Built by deliberately ignoring the classics (though guitarist Kristofer Steen makes no secret of his devotion to Robert Fripp and John McLaughlin), and precisely because of this, extremely fertile, explosive and compelling. A seemingly paradoxical outcome, yet one that had to be in the air: Godspeed You! Black Emperor, around the same years, arrived at similar conclusions (albeit with a very different sound) starting from a comparable background as Nordic anarcho-hardcore outsiders.

"The Shape Of Punk To Come" is, in fact, a multi-layered concept. First and foremost it's a musical and political manifesto, accompanied by copious liner notes for each of the twelve fragments making up the tracklist. "We are left out of the planning, our direction is set by the used-car salesman or the factory manager. Bored, we walk home with our heads hanging and our creativity robbed as a side effect of capitalist gain. […] Their products are death and they are the merchants of corruption and abuse. They are the slave-traders of our time. They are the inquisition. They are the machine that must be stopped." These are the liner notes found in the Epitaph edition for the opening "Worms Of The Senses/Faculties Of The Skull", seven minutes that on the record open with an iconic proclamation: "They told me that the classics never go out of style, but... They do!". Refused's claims proceed along two separate but inseparable tracks. On one hand, an anti-capitalist drive that doesn't stop at rhetoric against multinationals but spells out the everyday implications of a life built on conscious anti-system choices and actions. On the other, the desire to point to a musical path toward rebirth, starting by breaking the self-imposed chains placed on the genre by the very underground community that sustains it. And at the same time rejecting the reassuring compromises that had opened the doors of the mainstream to other bands.

Powered by granite-hard riffs à la Helmet, the first, heavily screamed track still has much in common with the metalcore of the first two albums, but the abundance of stop-and-go dynamics, the slanted guitar lines weaving into the rhythm, and the intrusions of effects and electronics create a new unpredictability that clears the field of any comparison with other bands on the scene. It only takes a few seconds to realize you've entered uncharted territory, that the comfort zone is behind you, and that now anything can happen.

And indeed it does. "Liberation Frequency" makes clear that radicalism and catchiness aren't incompatible. The track is at once far lighter and far heavier than anything hardcore was offering at the time, whether in its recent chart-bothering exploits or underground (even on "progressive" labels like SST, Dischord or Alternative Tentacles). Buoyant staccato chords, carefully measured drumming and a deep bass that slips in without drawing too much attention. Even the vocals sound distant, allowing themselves the frivolity of the odd high note: "We want the airwaves back", he sings, equating the freedom to roam across the airwaves with the freedom to build a critical consciousness. The chorus falls like an axe, marked by a jump in volume and violence: "What frequency are you getting?/ Is it noise or sweet sweet music?/ What frequency will liberation be?". The path to liberation might not be immediately obvious, and tying oneself to a single perspective would be a fatal mistake. A track this wildly shifting was, of course, unacceptable to both underground purists and fans of mainstream standardization.

Introduced by buzzing, applause, whistles and brief be-bop phrases (lifted from Art Blakey's version of "A Night In Tunisia"), "The Deadly Rhythm" is another furiously fast hardcore episode, one that nonetheless reveals the band's attentiveness to the thoroughly underground styles of screamo groups like Mineral and Portraits Of Past. It might seem like an inside joke confined to the hardcore scene, at least until, just before the two-minute mark, everything calms down, a swinging double bass enters, and roughly forty seconds of stillness set up the return of catharsis. The device of intruding outside elements (spoken phrases, radio snippets, murmurs, incursions of techno music) is actually one of the album's binding threads, its anarchic character pairing perfectly with the implicit metaphor of pirate radio, subject to a thousand interferences whose contribution is an inescapable part of the listening experience.

"Summerholidays Vs. Punkroutine" starts without any break, however, and is one of the points on the record closest to melodic hardcore: a vigorous descending riff, instantly memorable, alternates with a bass-driven verse and an equally catchy second guitar riff, later picked up by the chorus's vocal line. "Rather be forgotten than remembered for giving in": better to be forgotten than remembered for having caved. It's fitting that such a central message is entrusted to one of the album's most effective choruses.

After the jazzy techno of "Bruitist Pome #5" comes "New Noise", the most celebrated track of the band's entire career, covered by a range of artists from Anthrax to Crazy Town (yes, them) and featured in works as different as "Triangle Of Sadness" or the recent, already cult TV series "The Bear". Like the album as a whole, the track thrives on contrasts, the first and most striking of which is already there in its first, iconic ten seconds of guitar. Initially built on a bouncing exchange between just a handful of staccato notes, the riff gradually opens up, letting the strings ring out. Bass and drums support the crescendo, but the memorability of the intro already lies entirely in that opposition between held-back sound and its gradual release. Taken in isolation, it might almost sound like a passage from Bloc Party: instead, a progressive techno infiltration and the inevitable eruption into scream (with an epic, almost post-metal interlude) remind us exactly who we're dealing with. Over an alt-metal finale in the style of Therapy?, the Swedes sign off sardonically: "We dance to all the wrong songs/ We enjoy all the wrong moves/ We dance to all the wrong songs/ We're not leading!".

A brief adrenaline rush closing out in electronics-lab oscillations, "The Refused Party Program" is really just a short break before another main course, "Protest Song Of '68". With the ground now broken, the deck duly reshuffled, and some of the possible extremes explored, by this point the album can freely mix and match its choices without having to answer to any stylistic expectation. And indeed, save for a few blasts of thunderous metalcore, "Protest Song Of '68" is essentially an unclassifiable track. A journey through moods and atmospheres that has to be taken as it is, with its unforgettable drum incipit, the anxious marriage of guitar repetitions and spoken word, quotes from Henry Miller's "Tropic Of Cancer" and hardcore explosions. And with a long, lulling acoustic clearing that suddenly snaps back into the frantic opening theme. This is what Refused's new progressive rock sounds like: four and a half minutes of pure unpredictability.

Mixing hip hop with a minor-harmonic riff, "Refused Are Fucking Dead" sounds almost like nu metal, while the title track, "The Shape Of Punk To Come", basically fries every stylistic impulse on the record, every peak of lightness and heaviness, every orthodoxy or total lack thereof, to give the best possible clothing to the album's showpiece. "Like the rebellious swing kids of the '40s or the crazy jazzheads of the '50s or the stylish mods of the '60s, we have to recognize that style, as opposed to fashion, is necessary to challenge the conservatism that youth cultures load onto us", reads the liner notes about the track, "We need a new beat to move us, so grab your partner and ask: 'Do you want to go out with me, watch me get down on my knees and bleed? [...] This blind date will take us wherever we want to go'". Even more striking, though, is the chorus: "Hey baby, never felt this free/ A pair of new shoes and a punk rock show to see/ Give acclamation to these blue ribbon babies/ And check the calendar for the expiration date". So many of the album's values converge in just a few lines: freedom, the centrality of human relationships as the foundation of community, the will to embrace the new rather than be bound by the past, music's role as social fuel, and the awareness that everything has a limited lifespan and must eventually be burned down and dismantled, a task that, one day, will fall to others.

The two closing tracks, "Tannhäuser/Derivé" and "The Apollo Programme Was a Hoax", are (if anything) the album's most anomalous. Judging by these alone, no one would call their creators a hardcore band. The first, all cello, dissonant crescendos and leaden Neurosis-style detonations, is proof that the otherwise parallel paths of Refused and Godspeed You! Black Emperor are far less distant than the ocean separating them. The second (baffling, given that it's the least-streamed track on the album on Spotify!) is the perfect ending for such an energetic, unstoppable record. A purely acoustic, contemplative episode, in which double bass, guitar and melodica sketch an emotional atmosphere that isn't melancholy, isn't peace, and isn't even despair: it's acceptance of failure. Lucid, almost serene in the awareness of having done everything that could and should have been done. Yet not disenchanted, because the enchantment, the very spell that set everything in motion, is still just as magical, and it echoes through the lyrics: "'Cause if we have the vision I know that we are able [...] The destruction of everything is the beginning of something new/ Your new world is on fire and soon you'll be too".

Refused Are Dead (?): breakup and rebirth

"This manifesto is very much for real", reads the closing line of the booklet. Few take it seriously right away. Only specialist fanzines cover the album's release, though sometimes enthusiastically: one Punk Planet writer names it a possible contender for best hardcore album of the decade, while for Under The Volcano, "The Shape Of Punk To Come" is "the best punk/hardcore album of 1998. [...] The least you can do is go out and buy this CD. Not later, now". Inside Front applauds the band's shrewd decision to sign to Epitaph, so as to have the budget needed to make an album able to "show us what we could all be capable of". Using the system to fight the system, in a way.

For others, though, the marriage of the scene's metallic and political sides is a hard pill to swallow: Paranoize calls the record a fucking classic but complains about its excessive political emphasis, an impression shared by Suburban Voice. Even one of the scene's most widely read publications, Maximum Rock'n'Roll, is lukewarm overall, and puzzled by the record's fragmented nature and its perceived obsession with appearing "postmodern" (though it does concede that refusing to be pigeonholed is "these days, a strength").

No mainstream outlet, read by listeners outside the hardcore community, covers the album at the time. Too weird and wordy for the meatheads, too metallic for followers of more politicized hardcore, and simply "off the radar" for everyone else. Beyond being moving and evocative, the disillusioned mood of the album's closing track turns out to be something of a prophecy about the record's immediate fate.

Refused broke up just a few months after the release of "The Shape Of Punk To Come". The live promotion was a disaster in terms of audience response, and the Swedes didn't even finish their tour supporting Frodus. Tensions within the lineup were also growing, making a halt to activities a necessity. Their final show took place in a Virginia basement in front of about forty people, and was cut short by the arrival of the police after barely a handful of songs.

Just as the aforementioned early hardcore bands burned through their purpose within a few years, precisely because of how incendiary their music was, so too did Refused, after their masterpiece, exhaust their artistic function: what more could they have added, while still being themselves, that they hadn't already said? After releasing a farewell letter that includes, among other things, the line "We will never play together again and we will never try to glorify or celebrate what has been", Refused seemed to vanish for good.

The individual members went on to start various projects, but talk of a reunion only began in 2010. In the meantime, the band's standing and audience had grown enormously. A look at the pieces published after 2000 makes the shift in perspective clear: for Mike Diver of Drowned In Sound, as early as 2005, the album is already a bona fide landmark. In 2006, AllMusicGuide writes: "A lot of people listening to this album are going to say 'Hey, this isn't punk!' because they won't find the usual power chords [...] but that's what making a revolution means", and that same year SputnikMusic titles its review of the reissue "A legendary hardcore release. Absolutely essential". What's behind this reassessment?

Essentially, the album reached the ears of a different kind of listener. Around the turn of the millennium, even while admiring and loving the classics of the '80s, few fans of indie and alternative music actually followed contemporary hardcore scenes, which were seen as too insular and homogeneous (partly out of prejudice, but also because of the image those scenes projected). What it took to change their minds, and get them interested in that world, was a record that was fully realized and highly eclectic, capable of embodying the essential traits of hardcore aesthetics while also showing a strong openness to, and independence from, established models. "The Shape Of Punk To Come" was, from the title alone, perfect for the job. But it would hardly have won people over without someone championing it first. That someone couldn't have been the specialist press, which lacked the reach to connect with wider audiences, nor the mainstream or indie press, which had no firsthand experience of the record. What actually brought the album into the spotlight were musicians themselves.

Linkin Park ("We wouldn't exist without the influence of bands like Helmet, Strife and Refused"), Blink-182, Thrice, Hell Is For Heroes are just some of the artists who namechecked and praised the band in interviews with major music magazines in the early 2000s. Mention after mention, a growing number of fans grew curious, and the album became the inspiration for a new wave of "evolved hardcore" bands (often progressive too), illegitimate offspring of the '90s scenes but indebted instead to Refused's chimeric sound, the volcanic emo of At The Drive-In or the mathcore of Dillinger Escape Plan. By the time the mainstream press caught on to the album, it was already, in effect, a cult record with dozens of disciples among the bands that had emerged in those years (in 2018, a Stereogum piece would try to round them up: among them Poison The Well and Touché Amoré, Dance Gavin Dance and The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer A Place To Die, La Dispute, Frank Turner, Glassjaw). For some hardcore purists, Refused remain little more than posers who came out of nowhere, good enough for parvenus unfamiliar with the genre but far less brilliant than their openly declared influences like Nation Of Ulysses (an Impose piece, fittingly titled "The Shape Of Punk To Come Sucks", makes the case well). But no matter: by the mid-2000s, the Swedish band had firmly stepped out of the niche and earned itself a posthumous, but considerable, amount of credit with a far wider audience.

Contradicting their vow to never play together again or celebrate themselves, in 2012 Refused took the stage at the Coachella Festival, followed by appearances at other high-profile national and international events. The band downplayed it as a comeback, but live activity continued into 2014 and 2015. Inevitably, a fourth and fifth album followed too: "Freedom" (2015) and "War Music" (2019). Despite a few new deafening anti-capitalist post-hardcore anthems (sitting somewhat awkwardly, some noted, alongside the band's sky-high fees at the mega-festivals hosting them), this reborn Refused is less compelling than the band that, in 1998, sacrificed its own career to tear hardcore punk apart and undermine its foundations. Then again, it was the very first proclamation of their masterpiece that warned us: "They told me that the classics never go out of style, but... they do, they do. Somehow, baby? I never thought that... we do too".

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14/01/2024