When Refused's immortal genre-busting barn-burner The Shape of Punk to Come was released in 1998, it felt like an alien craft crash-landing on Earth. The Swedish quartet's opus was profoundly ahead of its time, arriving in the midst of sun-soaked ska (Less Than Jake, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones) and bratty, fratty buzz-bin bands like Eve 6. The album's lean towards the skronky, sulky, and socialistic put it at odds with the vibe of the time: it was too serious, too forlorn, too pretentious. As the years passed, its reputation grew, and it was eventually canonized and revered by everyone from Steve Albini to Hayley Williams of Paramore.
Eighteen years have passed since then, nearly two decades of silence kickstarted by the well-documented inter-band conflict explored in the documentary Refused Are Fucking Dead. A whole new generation of border-jumpers has risen from the wake of The Shape of Punk to Come, with bands like the Dillinger Escape Plan and the Bled venturing down the paths opened up by Refused's wrecking ball. And then, to everyone's surprise, they clawed their way out of the dirt in 2015 to announce a new album, Freedom.
It didn't take a miracle to bring Refused back from the fucking dead—just a brief reunion tour in 2012. After years of not speaking to each other, Refused found themselves locked into a groove. "Things happen, other things fall into place, and then all of a sudden you're in L.A. recording a Refused record," frontman Dennis Lyxzén told Rolling Stone recently, sounding incredulous at the band's return. On the surface, Freedom is unlike its predecessor in almost every way. It's a conscious shift precipitated by the firing of guitarist Jon Brännström, whose mathy riffs contributed heavily to the band's power. With their profusion of melodic verses and crunchy guitar hooks, the album could easily find a home on modern rock stations alongside bands like Rage Against the Machine and Muse. Stomping funk-slab "Françafrique" is more or less a lesson in colonialism taught by the Red Hot Chili Peppers (complete with a chorus of children à la "Aeroplane"), while the slinky late-album cut "Servants of Death" recalls Queens of the Stone Age's similarly skeezy hit "Smooth Sailing".
"Elektra" and "366", the album's pair of contributions from pop producer supreme Shellback, are the source of the album's biggest controversy. Some fans may blanch at the thought of a Billboard mainstay producing Refused songs, but given this band's interpretive talents, anything's possible. If they can channel the spirit of Ornette Coleman through hardcore punk, who's to say they can't channel the sounds of Top 40? But Shellback's work here brings to mind the kind of hulking, high-definition mixes one would expect from Will Yip and Mutt Lange, and the tracks don't stand out from what surrounds them. Listening to the album from start to finish, the songs are indistinguishable—an ironic flaw, considering how the producer is a huge fan of the band who learned to play drums by hearing The Shape of Punk to Come (perhaps this reverence kept him from seeking out Britney for a guest feature).
As with The Shape of Punk to Come, Freedom's lyrics focus on what the band perceives as the hypocrisy and complacency inherent in European identity, and how such complacency leads to death, rot, and ruin. Lyxzén plays the role of sociopolitical loudmouth with relish, flinging heretical imagery left and right. "Elektra" opens with the grisly image of a towering monument of corpses; "Old Friends/ New War" frames Lyxzén's existence within "centuries of fire." And of course, there's his frothing, ham-fisted stadium chant of "Murder Murder Murder Murder Murder Murder/ Kill Kill Kill!" on "Françafrique", a nine-word crowdpleaser worthy of a middle-school notebook.
The profusion of bloody births and spilled guts is jarring at first, but by the end of the album you become numb to it. You could argue that the repetition is an exercise in desensitizing the listener to the music's inherent violence, but that feels like a stretch. From the whole "Go back to sleep" bit on "Useless Europeans" to the calls to "Kill the Man" to rote atheistic exclamations ("Praise the Lord/God Is Dead!"), Freedom's lyrics read like the adolescent poetry of Tool had they favored Chomsky over Bill Hicks. The infamously awkward opening line of The Shape of Punk to Come—"I've got a bone to pick with capitalism and a few to BREAAAAAKK"—seems like Pulitzer material by comparison.
The biggest problem here doesn't lie with the Man, but rather with listeners like you and me, waiting with bated breath for an album to match The Shape of Punk to Come. Refused call this the "nostalgia circuit" and they can't stand it, because it's what they've been railing against ever since they started. "Working with somebody like Shellback is a great way of saying, 'We control what we do with this band'" ("fuck you", in other words). Fair enough: Refused have never been ones to kowtow to public opinion, only to pervert it, and in its hostile paradigm shift, Freedom reveals some of The Shape of Punk to Come's rebellious DNA. But even under the pretense of ironic ear candy, the band's hijacking of commonplace modern rock proves ultimately to be neither subversive nor satisfying. No, Refused are not fucking dead, but it's unclear from this album what they came back to accomplish.
