Refused call it quits – plays their last shows next year in North America and Sweden

Swedish hardcore punk band Refused have announced that they will stop playing their last shows in North America and Sweden next year.

The band’s drummer David Sandström announced the band’s plans and the recent heart attack of the band’s singer Dennis Lyxzén in an Instagram post.

The band originally formed in 1992 and split in 1998, making a comeback in 2012, after which they released two more albums. The band’s latest album, “War on Falsehood”, was released in 2019.

One of the band’s most notable albums, “The Shape Of Punk To Come”, will be 25 years old on 8 November. To mark the anniversary, a limited collector’s edition will be released, including the original album on three LPs of coloured vinyl, unreleased demos and rare alternative versions of the songs. The package also includes a tribute album “The Shape Of Punk To Come Obliterated”, featuring original and remixed versions of the album by various bands including Quicksand, Zulu, Gel, IDLES and Touché Amoré.

Refused’s farewell tour will start in North America in March-April 2025 and end in Sweden at the end of the same year.

We were supposed to do this in June. Roll out our modest farewell run, starting with the Rosendal Garden Party in Stockholm and then doing some light touring before calling it quits end of year. The rehearsals had been magnificent, the vibe was great and two days before the show we played a warm up show at Kulturhuset Femman in Uppsala. There were no pictures or video taken but it was a great show in front of maybe 60 local scenesters. We hung out afterwards, I had a few beers and me and Dennis, still vegan and basically straight edge, traded stupid stories about bands we love. It was a fine evening. Next morning I get a call from Dennis’ wife and a couple of tumultuous hours later it’s confirmed that he’s had a heart attack at the hotel.

We played our first show in February 1992. That same week George H.W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin held a press conference at Camp David to declare that the cold war was over. It was so long ago that I can’t quite remember who we were that wintry saturday when we piled into a car and drove up to Luleå to play 4 Gorilla Biscuits songs, a Shelter song, a AC\DC song and I think 3 original compositions to a crowd of 50-60 blind drunk northeners. We were teenagers who had never really travelled and by the time the band broke up in 1998 we had played over 500 shows all over Europe and the US. To say that the band changed our lives would be a gross understatement, and to say that we got to know each other in those seven years would be as well. A band that tours becomes like a family, especially when you do it in a van, with maps, scrambling to find a squat in Halberstadt where you were supposed to have started playing an hour ago. And family relations can be difficult. So it was with us.

That was partly why we wanted to give it another shot in 2012. We had made a decent splash in the nineties and the break up had been very sudden and chaotic, there were feelings and they were not aired out and the whole thing had been such a shitshow that it was almost inevitable that we’d get back on the horse at some point. We wanted a do-over, to see what was still there, if anything, and what could be made of it.

There’s a Neil Young song called Buffalo Springfield Again where he sings:
“I’d like to see those guys again and give it a shot
Maybe now we can show the world what we got
But I’d just like to play for the fun we had”
And that was basically it. We gave it several shots between 2012 and 2024. We all have different takes on how it went and what the legacy of the reformed band will be, but personally I felt we couldn’t quite agree on what we were supposed to do musically, and we were still struggling with that when the pandemic hit. At that point Kristofer was done, he left the band in August of 2020 and although there was a delayed effect to the death blow, a death blow it was.

So in the beginning of this year we started making plans to have one last big hurrah, to make the end of the band a fun, generous, indulgent affair. And that’s how it felt after the first show, it’s the best we’ve ever sounded and we were really enjoying ourselves, tossing in old songs we haven’t played since the nineties and even a Misfits cover. And then disaster struck. I visited Dennis in the hospital the day after he was admitted and true to form he was not happy about the hospital gown he was forced to wear. Hooked up to all these machines, unshaven with tousled hair, I swear the first thing he said was: (pointing to the gown) “I mean, this is not great”. I guess they don’t let you wear suits or Negative Approach t-shirts in the hospital.

So to the good news: Dennis is doing great. He’s one of the healthiest dudes I know, he’s gotten excellent care and they’ve run all the tests on him which all indicate he’s making a full recovery. Needless to say, he’s itching to get back on tour and he even suggested we should keep the preliminary dates in late fall and winter but we decided to postpone those and start up in the spring. And that’s where we’re at. We’re coming to the US and Canada in March/April 2025 and then we’ll see what we’re gonna do with the rest of that year. All we know is that we want to finish back home in Sweden sometime that winter. Let us know if there are songs you want us to play and we’ll give them a shot. Hope to see you out there.

//David The band’s drummer David Sandström announced in their Instagram account.

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