'The Shape of Punk to Come' was released in 1998 by Swedish hardcore punk band Refused. The band is set to play The Rave on Friday, Feb. 28, 2020.
Every so often, an album comes along that redefines the genre completely. The Shape of Punk to Come by Refused didn’t sound like any hardcore punk album you’d heard before, blowing open song structure, incorporating jazz into traditional breakdowns and blending choppy stop-start tempos with ambient textures, headlined by the mid-album revolutionary clarion call, “New Noise.”
Despite being truly ahead of its time, the commercial and critical response to the album was dismal. Refused was fraying and would make it through eight shows of a poorly-attended U.S. tour before imploding in 1998. By the time Coachella came calling (again) with a fat check in 2012, the band members were living in the same town and working in different combinations on various side projects.
It made sense to reunite, and they’ve been going strong since, boosted by hard-earned maturity. They are presently supporting War Music, their second post-reunion release.
“When you're a kid, you don’t really know what you're doing,” says lead signer Dennis Lyxzén, who was 19 when Refused formed in Sweden in 1991. “To make a band function and have a longevity and a life to it, you need to sort of figure out the dynamics in the relationship. I think just from being apart for a long time, most of us kind of figured that out.”
They took a couple years off after 2012’s reunion tour before recording 2015’s Freedom, which very much tried to pick up where Shape left off. Freedom continues to explore new ideas and incorporate elements culled from the members’ other projects. Trying to creatively bridge the 14 years may have cost immediacy, something Refused sought to remedy this time out.
“We started writing for War Music from the kind of starting point of what worked on Freedom,” Lyxzén says. “We kind of had an idea of ‘this type of riff will work; this type of riff will fucking destroy the room.’”
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In the press, Lyxzén called it the “album people wanted us to make the first time.” It’s a more brutal, uncompromising album from the music to the lyrics.
“Maybe halfway into a new process, you're like, ‘Oh, this is the record it's going to be,’” he explains. “Because before that, you can go in every other direction, because you're just writing a bunch of songs. Then, halfway into the process, everyone's like, ‘Oh, it's gonna be one of those records: super political, very tight, focused, aggressive. Nice.’”
The problem with making a groundbreaking album like Shape is that you wind up sort of having to compete with yourself.
“It's flattering that people still want to talk about something we recorded 22 years ago. It's insanely flattering that, every time we play ‘New Noise,’ people lose their shit,” Lyxzén says. “But when you put out a new record and someone wants to compare it with Shape, you’re like, ‘come on, fuck off.’ But at the end of the day… it's pretty amazing that we managed to create something that still resonates with people to this day.”
Refused perform at 8 p.m. Friday, Feb. 28, at The Rave, 2401 W. Wisconsin Ave.
