Refused

Swedish rock band Refused wasn’t just ruminating about the lasting impact of popular culture when it began its 1998 album The Shape Of Punk To Come with a lyric about classics never going out of style — it was also taking stock of its own turbulent existence, which met an ignominious end later that year in front of 50 kids at a basement show in a Virginia college town. Indeed, Refused came and went before the true power of its music could be understood, even by its own members. And in the ensuing years, the band cast a giant shadow over the world of underground rock, with the boundary-exploding Shape rising to all-time legendary status as it influenced a new generation of musical revolutionaries.

After Refused, frontman Dennis Lyxzen, drummer David Sandstrom, guitarist Kristofer Steen and bassist Magnus Flagge started anew in a host of different bands — sometimes in various combinations of playing together, sometimes making music they didn’t intend anyone else to hear. All the while, “Refused was this weird albatross,” says Lyxzen. “I could play a great show and walk out into the crowd afterward, and someone would come up and say, ‘I love Refused.’ For a long time, playing together again wasn’t even on the table.”

An offer to reunite for the 2012 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in the California desert spurred the band back into action, and the triumphant tour that followed found Refused playing to heretofore inconceivably massive crowds around the world. Initially reluctant, Lyxzen says “I thought it’d be Coachella and nine more shows. That’d be it. Then we started practicing, and we wound up doing 82 shows. Now we’re back with a new record, so it must have felt right.”