Refused Say They Took Punk Rock ‘To Another Level’

On the eve of their first – and likely their last – Australian tour ever, Swedish hardcore band Refused have explained the motives behind their reunion and the impact they felt they have.

Their demise could not have been more final back in 1998, when an open letter titled Refused Are Fucking Dead contained lines such as “...we will never play together again and we will never try to glorify or celebrate what was”.

Fast forward to 2012 and frontman Dennis Lyxzén has admitted that the group could no longer ignore the signs that it was the right time to reform after years of knocking back reunion offers based on their seminal album The Shape of Punk to Come: A Chimerical Bombination in 12 Bursts.

“It was just one of those deals where it just kind of came together. For the first time in a long time we were all living in the same city, and Kris [Steen – guitar/bass] and David [Sandström – percussion] started playing music together again – they hadn't done that in ages, David hadn't played drums at all in ten years or something like that. So all of a sudden we're all moving in the same sort of circles and all hanging out together, and then we got the offer from Coachella and it just felt like something that we should try to do. We'd had offers from them for years – every other year they'd give us an offer – but it had always been, 'No, that's impossible,' but all of a sudden it felt possible. So we tried it out, and yeah, it could be done!”

Lyxzén also claimed that they're still relevant today because they we so pioneering when they split.

“I think one of the reasons of course is the music – there's some kick-ass songs on that last record that spoke to a lot of people, and I think we came at the right time and in the right place,” he mused. “We were kind of groundbreaking with what we did – since then a lot of bands have done similar things – but we were one of the first bands to take punk rock and hardcore to another level... without sounding too pretentious, we were that band.”

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