After two albums of abrasive metalcore, in 1998 Swedish hardcore kids Refused – David Sandström, Dennis Lyxzén, Kristofer Steen and Jon Brannström – flipped punk on its head, created an entire new sound, and then almost immediately disappeared. Like fingering a perverse Rubik’s Cube, they altered and refined their previous influences and intellectual ideas, and in the process produced an album of furious intent and unrivalled reactionary beauty. Truly a Chimerical Bombination in 12 Bursts.

“I got a bone to pick with capitalism, and a few to break”

Rather than the online squawking of a bearded, greasy bedroom Communist, this is the immortal line that ferociously kicks in the door to Refused’s seminal 1998 hardcore punk odyssey, The Shape of Punk To Come. Although it was widely unrecognised at the time, the album’s influence and critical reception have been slowly simmering to the boil ever since its makers’ demise at the end of that year. Through the continual rippling effect of word-of-mouth and the Internet, it has engulfed everyone from rebellious teenagers to the disheartened solitary vets of punk’s heyday with its pick-and-mix concoction of genres and warped political ideals.

Formed in Sweden in 1991, Refused released two albums – This Just Might Be The Truth and Songs To Fan The Flames Of Discontent – before they arrived at TSOPTC. Caustic, ambitious affairs, these two records laid the foundations for their masterpiece, exploring the musical techniques and left-wing revolutionary dogma that would later come to fruition.

Upon first listening to TSOPTC, idiots may interject with, ‘Yo, this isn’t punk!’ and initially it seems that they aren’t far wrong: simpleton power chord riffs are replaced with staccato, drop-D guitar bludgeons; the drums eschew standard fare for spontaneous jazz fills and upbeat ride cymbal rhythms; Dennis Lyxzén’s voice dances between spoken word pleas and vocal-chord tearing, bleak screams; and the lyrics resemble a party political broadcast by a drugged-up Karl Marx. Somehow, this horrific-sounding list of musical ingredients works: TSOPTC deconstructs the specifications of punk, and is a revolution in itself.

Despite Refused following both vegan and straight edge lifestyles, TSOPTC avoids self-preservationist credos and deals almost exclusively in deformed socialist and situationist ideas. In an echo of Joe Strummer’s obsession with communications, ‘Liberation Frequency’ tackles the monopolisation and manipulation of radio by huge corporations, its airy guitar ushering in Lyxzén’s sinister demand: “We want the airwaves back / We want transmission for the people, by the people.” It’s not all agitprop though – flanking the often militant, anarcho lyrics are motivational, empowering numbers, with the sprawling ‘Protest Song ‘68’ reminding us that “we could be dangerous – art as a real threat”.

Backing up this creative, expressionistic mindset is ‘New Noise’, undoubtedly the band’s anthem. Its alternate-picking riff and regimented snare rolls assemble themselves as part of a gallant march, before an ambient, glazed interlude signals the calm before the storm: Lyxzén’s eternal bark, “Can I scream?” hacks down the restraining barrier, and a gargantuan distorted riff takes over, carrying the song through myriad peaks and troughs. Like Gorilla Biscuits’ hardcore classic Start Today, TSOPTC gives you the incentive to sidestep procrastination, and makes you believe you can personally incite change through creativity: “How can we expect anyone to listen if we are using the same old voice? / We need new noise, new art for the real people.”

Disillusioned with the music industry, the band echoed the sacrificial words of ‘Summer Holiday vs. Punkroutine’ (“Rather be forgotten than remembered for giving in.”), and burnt out with the blaze of a million exploding suns. TSOPTC disfigured and distorted punk, stretching this comatose genre to its limits at the end of a decade that had succumbed to second-rate detritus and the harrowing throes of US pop-punk.

With the tact of a gangrenous back alley hooker, last month Epitaph Records batted their come-to-bed eyes, uploading an ambiguous website that stoked the fires of a full-blooded Refused reunion. Alas, we now know these rumours were untrue – Epitaph are simply re-releasing TSOPTC – and it seems unlikely that these principled reactionaries will ever go back on this, their closing, vitriolic battle cry. Still the disaffected, politically intoxicated hardcore kids they always were, the members are now in other bands, out there somewhere making noise, sleeping on floors, and probably knowing that TSOPTC will never be topped; by themselves or by their imitators. Make no mistake, Refused are fucking dead.

This article first appeared in AU65, May 2010.