In Conversation: Dennis Lyxzén of Refused

The Shape of Punk to Come didn't predict hardcore's future as much as it changed it. Reflecting on its 25th anniversary, there are still some things the Refused singer would have done differently.

Dennis Lyxzén with Refused. Live at Terminal 5. New York, NY. April 23, 2012. Photo by Michael Dubin.

In my mind, the Refused story is still one of the most improbable hardcore success stories of all time. When I first met them in 1993, they were a band of upstart vegan straight-edge kids opening the Swedish leg of a Shelter tour I was playing on. I still don’t remember any of the other European bands we played with that year, but Refused were determined to leave an impression on us—and they did. At one point, they even invited us to a studio in Stockholm to record gang backup vocals for their debut album, This Just Might Be… the Truth, and we were so taken by their ambition that we instantly agreed. When we got there, Dennis Lyxzén put us in a booth and said, “Right here, we want you to scream ‘We’re back!’”

Ray Cappo and Porcell looked at each other and laughed. “You mean, like on the Youth of Today record?”

“Exactly like the Youth of Today record,” Dennis happily instructed us. And so we sang that part, among other things, because we respected their confidence—even if the music wasn’t quite there yet. Had the story of Refused ended only five years later, with The Shape of Punk to Come, it would have still been a progression of remarkable proportions. To mark the 25th anniversary of that landmark album, Dennis and I reassess the wild circumstances that led to its creation—as well as the self-destruction that followed.

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This was a little disconcerting to realize, but The Shape of Punk to Come is now literally five years older than we were when we met [laughs]. So… that’s fucking wild. Do you feel a greater sense of mortality as these records get older?

DENNIS: Yes. I mean, it’s interesting because I’m not someone that looks at my past that much. I’m always so focused on trying to move forward. But it all becomes very tangible, this life that we’ve lived, when someone from the record label calls and says, “It’s been 25 years since Shape came out.” Because in my mind, I feel like I’ve been learning music this whole time. I feel like I’m learning life. I feel like I am not a seasoned veteran in this game. But I guess we are. I guess I am.

There are times when I think about… maybe not mortality, but I think about how long I can keep doing what I’m doing. You’ve seen me live. I have a certain standard of what I want to project when I play live. So that’s something I think about: How long can I keep doing that, and if I can’t do that, then do I still want to play live?

The other part of that equation is that you were roughly 25 years old when you made that record.

DENNIS: Yes. I was 25 when we recorded it.

How would you describe the 25-year-old you?

DENNIS: I was quite an unreasonable character. I was pretty high strung, especially after we put out Songs to Fan the Flames [of Discontent] and up until Shape got released and we broke up. I was really focused on the political side of what I wanted to do and I had this gnawing feeling that this is it—that I needed to be some kind of revolutionary character—and that caused friction. Because I could say shit like, “Music is a bourgeois construction that only serves as a vehicle for the revolution” to someone who has been in the practice space writing riffs for ten hours, and they’re gonna be like, “What are you talking about?” [laughs]. So yeah, I was quite intense and I was not a very forgiving person, I think. I was so focused on what I wanted to accomplish that, yeah, I could be kind of a dick.

Which is weird because when we met in 1993, I very much saw you guys as a fun-loving group of people.

DENNIS: Which we were. I think that’s an important thing. The thing with Refused in 1993, we were political in the sense that it was part of the language of the punk or hardcore that we grew up with, and it was around that time that I started getting into political ideas for real. But up until the last year of Refused, it was fun! We were a fun group of people. It was serious because we had all these ideas and agendas, but we had a good time. And I think that’s why when you came to Umeå to play [with Shelter] in 1993, there were 600 kids—because it was fun. Sometimes that gets lost in the shuffle.

Kris [Steen] did that documentary that came out, Refused are Fucking Dead, and it’s just dour. It feels like we’re just a bunch of complete bummers as people, but we weren’t really. I’m just atoning to the fact that in that last year, when it wasn’t that much fun, I was so focused on political agendas that I kind of forgot how to have a good time. I was really whiny [laughs].

I also played on a Shelter tour in 1998, right before Shape came out, and we played a show together in Stockholm, I think. And I remember that you guys pulled up, running into the venue with garment bags in your hands, and you saw me and literally the first thing you said was, “Hey, what’s up! We just spent all our tour support money on custom suits!” [laughs]. So that was my first impression of Shape right there—that it was a very perfect mix of “We take ourselves too seriously” and “We don’t take ourselves seriously at all.”

DENNIS: When I look back on the record, it’s a fun record. There are a lot of fun elements to it, and it’s kind of uninhibited and free in that way. But also, at that point, we weren’t really getting along, which is always a bit of an issue when you’re supposed to be having fun.

In Refused are Fucking Dead you described that time in the band by saying it wasn’t “a warm, inclusive, friendly environment.” So, I guess there are two things there: One, what does that really mean? And two, what do you think changed?

DENNIS: Wow. I mean, the biggest change is that the band got bigger, and it became a real thing that we were doing 24-7. And then I think that in the last year we were all moving in different directions, and I think everyone was kind of tired of what Refused represented to them—because it had become one of those things where the band and the band’s ideas represented something way bigger than the individual’s ideas. I think that was frustrating, and people lashed out.

Like, case in point: Yes, we made suits because I was really excited about the whole mod thing and sixties music. And then a couple of the guys “lost their suits” after six shows, and I was like, “Hey, we spent some money on this!”—but they were inexplicably gone [laughs]. When people are not in balance as far as their mental health goes, you start to take it out on other people, so there was a little bit of that atmosphere as well, where people were lashing out against each other in ways that are not really great if you want to be in a van together all the time.

What also changed, though, is that we grew up. Being in a band, and especially creating that last record, it was such a wild and free record. I think it opened everyone’s minds to the idea that the possibilities are endless, and that really changed us too. You have to realize that when we did Shape, I was 25 and David [Sandström] was 22. We were young, and everybody started having different ideas about what they wanted to do with their lives and what they wanted to do with music and with politics as well, which was a bummer. I think I was the one that was mostly about the scene and being like, “We should be a political hardcore band.” But a couple of people in the band were not interested, and that changed the dynamics of what we were doing. Because for a long time we were so on the same level; we were so focused towards the same goal. And then one day you wake up and you realize, “Yeah, that guy doesn’t want to be here. He wants to do something completely different.” It changed gradually, but when we made that record, the floodgates just opened. There was this sense that we could do anything we wanted. And that changed the way we saw music, basically.

Refused. Live at Metro. Chicago, IL. Riot Fest, 2016. Photo by Ryan Bakerink.

Take yourself out of the band at that time for a second. Why do you think you became so single-minded about being a “revolutionary?”

DENNIS: There were a couple of things. I think one of the things is that we saw what happened when people got together and really pushed for ideas. Even in the ‘90s when it was more about the individual—like you were vegan or straight-edge or queer, it was about how “the personal is political”—you could still see a massive change in people’s mentalities. So to be part of something like that, and to see how music and art and culture could change people’s perspective of the world, that was one thing.

The other thing is that I didn’t expect that anybody would take me seriously as a spokesperson for anything. So when that happened, when people started listening, I had this notion that if we were going to sing about these things, we needed to be serious. You need depth in these ideas, and it can’t just be slogans that you’re shouting. So I got really involved in politics and I had a bunch of friends that I lived with who were studying sociology and political science and it just became this natural thing for me. I moved in those circles maybe more than the normal hardcore scene at that point. I was just so into the idea that this has to mean something and it has to be something tangible and real—and politics and the destruction of capitalism felt real! It felt like something we could do.

When I think about my experience in Shelter, I often think about the way being in a band that is essentially holding up a very serious ideology can be so personally and mentally and physically exhausting. You can easily break your brain over it.

DENNIS: Totally.

Was there a point when you started feeling that?

DENNIS: Yes, but I think it was more on the personal level—partly because the interpersonal relationships weren’t functioning, but also partly because I was banging my head against the wall about how this is something that I want to do. So when Refused broke up and we started The (International) Noise Conspiracy, it was musically, politically, and mentally about needing to take two steps back to take a step forward. We needed to have a band that’s fun and we needed to talk about politics in a way that’s not so aggressive and blunt. Noise Conspiracy was probably more political than Refused, but it was one of those bands where we were like, let’s play soulful, danceable music, and then we’ll sneak the politics in there.

I think I also realized around this time that if you want to be a revolutionary, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. In the last couple of years of Refused, I thought it was a sprint. I was like, “We’re fucking overthrowing capitalism—maybe next week, I think it’s going to happen?” [laughs] But then you understand: No, you’re probably going to fight until the day you die and then that’s it, and hopefully, you’ve made a little dent here and there. I realized that I needed to change my entire outlook on how I’m doing this.

I was actually just having an exchange with someone in the comments section where we were talking about political sustainability, and the idea that in order to make a real change, there has to be a sustained level of pressure. But in order to have a sustained level of pressure, you can’t kill yourself.

DENNIS: Yes [laughs]. I think that, as someone who has spent a good part of my life in radical leftist circles, that is what happened to a lot of people. They got super burned out on politics because it was like, “I’m going to pass out a thousand flyers. We’re going to do all these actions. We’re going to go to these protests. We’re going to write these fucking essays”—and then after two years, they’re completely burned out because it’s 100 percent what you do. I think that, for me in life now, and for me with Noise Conspiracy, I was trying to find a balance. If you’re going to apply the pressure, you need to find some sort of balance in your own life. Your entire life cannot be about that. I mean, it could sort of be about that, but you need to know where to focus your energy and focus your actions. I had so many friends that were such radicals and they’re just gone. They couldn’t deal with what that meant. For me, I’m still here talking about the same issues, but I try to do it in a way where it doesn’t wear me down too much.

There’s this concept in linguistics—the prescriptive versus the descriptive. Have you ever heard of it?

DENNIS: No.

OK, so this pertains to how we use words. If we think about the word “radical,” there is a prescriptive version and a descriptive version of how we understand it. The descriptive way is saying, “This person holds the characteristics of X, Y, and Z, and therefore they are a radical.” The prescriptive version is saying, “I am a radical, therefore I must conform to X, Y, and Z.” The difference here being that one is simply describing the state of a person’s character. But the other one is when a person takes that word and feels like they must be constrained to whatever they believe that word means.

DENNIS: Yes, which I think, for me in the ‘90s, that’s definitely what I was. I mean, it was honest. I was genuine about what I wanted to do. But I also had a lot of preconceived ideas of how I was “supposed to be” to be radical. So as you said, it was like, you need to tick these boxes. If I’m going to be a revolutionary radical, I need to do this and I need to do that and I need to think this. That takes a lot of energy and that’s not honest.

Dennis Lyxzén and Magnus Flagge. Live at Terminal 5. New York, NY. April 23, 2012. Photo by Michael Dubin.

This is more of an aesthetic question, but when I first got the record, the first thing I thought about was how much of a pastiche it was, how many referential things were on it. From the album art to “Refused are Fucking Dead” to the suits to even the title of the album! Everything was referential, and I’m kind of curious where your mindset was with all that. Like, was there ever a point where you were like, “Hey, we’re really fucking throwing everything into the soup here.”

DENNIS: No, I don’t think we ever thought that. I think pop culture has always done that, making references to other things to sort of widen what you’re doing. I mean, yes, some of it is super self-indulgent to be like, “Yeah, we’re hip to that!” But I still love to leave breadcrumbs for people to discover stuff. I think it’s a really powerful thing to do as an artist, when you have references to stuff and you have all these little notes that if people really want to dig deeper, they can discover new things. But yes, now when I look at it, it’s the work of some twenty-something kids discovering pop culture, basically. And they’re like, “Let’s cram everything in there!” [laughs]

But also, not a lot of hardcore bands did that. Not a whole lot of hardcore bands talked about Beat culture or jazz music or the Situationists. I remember David and I were talking before the album came out, and I said, “I don’t think the hardcore kids are going to like this record.” And David was like, “Yeah, I’m not worried. It’s a great record.” We were both right. When we started playing that record, when we were touring for it, the hardcore scene was just like, “Oh, they’re pretentious idiots. Fuck these guys.” And then a year later [after we broke up], obviously, we were both correct in our assessment of how people would react to it.

I think one thing people might not fully grasp if they weren’t there, though, is that the mid-’90s especially brought out a lot of very pretentious hardcore. Like, you weren’t alone. Even a band like Ink & Dagger. Everybody loves Ink & Dagger now, and they had a level of popularity when they were a band. But people thought that shit was pretentious! [laughs] And Sean [McCabe, the band’s late singer] would have been the first person to say that.

DENNIS: 100 percent. The perfect storm was Refused and Ink & Dagger touring together in 1998 [laughs]. I mean, there were a lot of bands that were definitely trying to break the patterns that were set in hardcore in the mid- to late-’90s. There were a lot of bands trying to break free of the constraints. For a lot of people who discover punk and hardcore, it can become this uniform. I jokingly say that, for some people, it can become this little closet that you lock yourself into and say, “This is my world now.” But for me and a whole lot of other people, punk and hardcore was about the possibility of: We can do anything we want, and this is kind of the basic foundation that we’re going to use to do all these cool things.

Sometimes in pushing against boundaries, you can sort of create new ones.

DENNIS: Yes.

So what I’m interested in—and this is a question you can field from the future, now that Refused are no longer fucking dead—is how do you feel the boundaries have expanded or collapsed over time with what you feel like you can personally express in this band?

DENNIS: Oh, interesting. When we first got back together and were starting to write new music, I think there was a little bit of an identity crisis because we hadn’t written new music together for like 15 or 16 years. It was like, how can we express what we are? Because like I said, I’m not a nostalgic person. I don't think any of us were interested in reliving the past. We wanted to create a language, both musically and lyrically, that is fitting for who we are today. The same thing for how we look on stage or the way we approach the music. We don’t want to go up there and be like, “Do you remember the ‘90s?!” [laughs]

So I think that we’re free to express whatever we want. But I also think that, interestingly enough, the idea that I had for what Refused should be in the mid- to late-’90s, that is kind of what the idea of Refused is now. It’s this vehicle of music and politics, and we want to have a very specific agenda with it. I think musically we can do pretty much whatever we want. The way I sing and the way David plays drums and the way we interact is always going to be kind of Refused. But I don’t think we feel like we need to be this band where every time we’re going to write a new song, it has to break all these barriers or that it has to be this “new” thing. Refused has a language, and we’re just trying to use it to the best of our abilities.

Have you ever written about Refused breaking up in a Refused song?

DENNIS: In 1998, after Shape, we recorded one song for a compilation on Burning Heart, and the song is called “Peek-A-Boo,” and it is me singing about how the band is breaking up and how I don’t like the political direction we’re taking. It’s a pretty scathing attack on the other guys in the band, and we released it while we were still a band! I remember David was reading the lyrics like, “Whaaaat?” And I was like, “Uh… I don’t know, man!” [laughs]. It’s pretty balls out. After that, no, I don’t think we felt the need to write about it. Maybe one day, who knows. But yeah, I did write a diss track about the other guys in the band in 1998.

This question was not planned, and this is a very Anti-Matter thing to ask, but I’m genuinely curious: Refused breaks up. You go home. Did you cry?

DENNIS: Possibly. I remember when we were in the States touring and the vibes were pretty bad and we did three shows and then we broke up in Atlanta. We had already started working on new music and we owed the studios money, so [when they said they wanted to go home], my leverage was like, “If we’re not doing this band, then the band is done.” I thought that was leverage, but everyone was like, “Yeah, OK, then the band is done.” And I was like, “Oh nooo, that wasn’t the plan” [laughs]. Anyway, we still had to play another six shows because we couldn’t afford to go home; we had to get back to D.C. So before that last show in Harrisburg, Virginia, I had a talk with David where he said, “I’m going to keep doing music with Kris and Jon [Brännström]. We don’t want to do music with you in the future”—which was super heartbreaking. Because it was Jon who wanted to go home from the tour and I wanted to stay. And they picked Jon’s side. I don’t remember if I cried, because it was right before the show when he took me aside, but I was really torn up about it.

When I came home from tour, I had two weeks before I was practicing with Noise Conspiracy. So I didn’t really have a lot of time to grieve over what happened. I think—as men do when they’re trying to deal with their grief—I was like, “I’m just going to push on… I’m going to soldier on!” [laughs] Maybe I cried a little bit, but I was too busy trying to put the pieces back together, basically.

Do you think that this choice they made, of Jon over you, was that something that could be directly attributed to your zealousness? Or were you just being a dick? [laughs]

DENNIS: Maybe [laughs]. I think I was kind of being a dick because I just wanted to tour. I wasn’t very understanding. Jon had a breakdown and I was like, “What? We’re touring. Get it together, man.” But that’s not cool. That’s not how you should do it. We were young and we couldn’t communicate. Nobody talked about how they felt. It was just all this silent tension. We were just going in different directions, which is sad because me and David started this band and we were thick as thieves for all these years, and then one day he was like, “This is not working for me.” So you have to swallow that and be like, “OK, what do I do now?”

Refused, live at a secret show at Scharinska villan. Umeå, Sweden. February 29, 2012. Photo by Mårten Persson.

Did you ever have any resentment for Refused as it got bigger the longer you stayed broken up?

DENNIS: I did. It was weird because when we broke up and I came home and everything was raw and wide open, like I said, I soldiered on. I’m like, let’s start a new band. Let’s push ahead. So we started Noise Conspiracy. We start practicing. We start playing quite immediately. And a couple of months after we started playing, people were like, “Hey! You’re on MTV. All these people are talking about this Refused record,” and I’m like, “Wait. What’s happening? Where were you two years ago?” So of course, in the early days of Noise Conspiracy it was really tough because you want to build something and you want to mold your own identity of what this band is supposed to be, but then people just keep reminding me of Refused every day—and that was really frustrating.

Do you think that if people had responded more positively to the record when it first came out that it could have saved your personal relationships? Or do you think Refused was just doomed?

DENNIS: I think we were doomed. I also think that if we were to have become popular in 1998, we would have blown it in 1999. Because that follow-up record that would have come out after Shape? Nobody wanted that record! [laughs] I’m really glad that we had sixteen years before we made new music because that’s what we needed. I know that the follow-up to Shape, it would have been a horrible record.

I feel like we’re at the stage of our lives where a 30th anniversary tour is not a given. So tell me a little bit about the lack of public acknowledgement of the 25th anniversary.

DENNIS: So here’s the thing. There is a Shape of Punk 25-year anniversary vinyl package coming out. It’s a compilation with the record, plus demos and weird stuff. And then there’s a whole record of covers coming out and there are some fucking killer covers on it. It was supposed to come out now, but because of the last couple of years of pressing plant issues, it will come out early next year. So we’re doing something, but not a whole lot. We’re not playing shows though.

Is there some sort of reasoning behind that?

DENNIS: Not really. I think it’s just different wills of what we want to do. The main part doesn’t even have to do with Shape 25 or anything. The main part is that we put out a record right before the pandemic and we felt that we had some good momentum. And then the pandemic came and it really knocked the wind out of our sails. It really made us wonder why we were doing this. So we started writing new material. We have a lot of new demos. But then we decided early this year that we were going to take a break from doing Refused full-on—not breaking up, but I think we all felt that if we’re going to do Refused we need to be fully focused. Like, I don’t know if you know this, but two months ago David put out his first crime novel. He’s been working on this book for like three years. It just came out and he’s already been nominated for the Best Debut Crime Novel in Sweden. So he’s been writing a follow-up, and he’s super busy.

I mean, as always, I’m entertaining ideas because I think it could be fun, so I was like, “Maybe we should do a Shape 25 tour…” But then it got shut down early on in the conversation and we just decided the next thing we’re doing is new music. We’re not gonna be that nostalgic band. But I think David said something funny when we were talking about this. He said, “I’m too young to go out and play Shape in its entirety” [laughs].

I wanted to talk a little bit about the things that came with the album—like the movie and also the “manifesto.” There were things in both that, if we’re being real, are a little bit cringey [laughs]. I think you have self-awareness around these things, so I wanted to ask how you think those things have held up over time.

DENNIS: Yeah. I haven’t seen the movie in a long time, so I don’t really know about it. I think that it's beautifully shot, but like I said, it’s dour. It’s just so bleak. It’s just like, oh, we’re so upset and angry—and I don’t think that’s a true representation of who we were as a band. I think if you see that movie, you’d be like, “Oh yeah, those sour pusses, they should have broken up.”

I will say, as someone who has known you guys for so long, watching it again was very much like, “Who are these people?”

DENNIS: That’s kind of how I felt, too. Because I like it. It looks beautiful. But the vibe of it, what I think Kris wanted to get through was just… I don’t fully agree on some of those things, but then again, it’s not my movie. Kris made the movie. So it was like, you know, you do whatever you want. That being said, I haven’t seen it in a long time.

As far as the manifesto goes, it’s kind of awesome and it’s stupid at the same time. Someone actually read it to me like two weeks ago. It’s one of those things where it’s just so pretentious and over the top that it’s just funny. That’s kind of how I feel about it. Because [when I wrote it], I came home, we’re broken up, and I’m upset. The other guys, they broke up with me basically. They were like, “We don’t want to date you anymore. Fuck you.” And I felt like I needed to regain a little bit of control over the band, because it felt like mine and David’s band to a large extent, and then one day it was like, I’m not in this band. So I felt like I needed to write the manifesto so I could have the last word basically [laughs]. Parts of the manifesto were super funny and parts of it are just me being a pretentious dick at age 25.

It feels a lot like when someone tells a joke and you’re not sure if it’s a joke. It rides that line. We were like, is he serious?

DENNIS: It was kind of serious, but really it was one of things where it was also taking the piss out of everything that people expect us to be. It was like, “Burn all the photos! We will never do interviews! Fuck media, they don’t understand anything!” It’s serious, but it’s very tongue-in-cheek serious. It’s kind of funny.

I recently published an interview with James Spooner from Afropunk where he talked about writing a manifesto when he was a hardcore kid, and I was like, “Oh yeah! I totally forgot that kids wrote manifestos in the ‘90s!”

DENNIS: There was something about that time when there was a little bit of a competition over who could be the most political person on the block. I think all the intentions were true, but I also think there was a lot of posturing. Like, “I’m so fucking political. Look at how political I am!” And I mean, I’m guilty of that [laughs].

OK, one last thing. Take your time with this. I want you to think of one thing—something you said, something you did, something that made the record, something that didn’t make the record, something that happened at any point before you broke up—that 25 years later, you’re honest enough to say you would take back.

DENNIS: I’m sure there’s a lot of stuff I wish I could take back. [Pauses] I mean, I’m really sad that I was so rigid about everything. I was so determined in how I wanted things to be that I already had a mapped-out plan in my head about what we were going to do for the next two years. I had all these ideas. And I had no flexibility in my brain to see that Jon was suffering. We were on tour and he was suffering and I was like, “No. I just want to be on tour. I don’t have the emotional or mental capacities to deal with how he’s feeling.” The band would have broken up anyway, but I do feel like I could have dealt with that better. I could have been way more understanding. I could have been more sympathetic to the fact that he was not enjoying it. And instead of trying to force someone to go on tour, I should have been like, “Yeah, I get it. Let’s just do some more shows and then go home and regroup and see what we’re gonna do next.” But I was so adamant about being on tour. And I think also a lot of it was so tied up in my identity that I had a really hard time seeing how he felt, and how the other guys felt as well. It became this battle of wills—like, who is going to break first? And I didn’t want to break, so we broke up instead.

Is that something that you might also attribute as a pitfall of political philosophy or ideology? Where these ideas almost take precedence over the people?

DENNIS: Yes. And I think that is a problem. That’s something you learn, because you can have political ideas or you can have political analysis, but there needs to be flexibility towards people you meet. Because nothing is static. We don’t come from the same background or situation; we don’t come from the same class, even. There are all these different areas where how I think about the world or how I see the world might not relate at all to someone else—so you need to find that ground: Where can you relate to each other? Where can you find a conversation? 

Back in the ‘90s, I wasn’t interested in a conversation about politics. I was interested in the idea that politics should change the world. And now, I still think about politics a lot, but I am very interested in the conversation about politics. I think that my radical political ideas should be starting points for a discussion and then we’ll see where we can meet. Maybe sometimes you can’t meet; that’s also fine. But that was the ‘90s. I was definitely not the only person that was quite unreasonable with my political ideas. There was a lot of petty politics back then, too. Like, “Let’s cancel this band for putting out a record on Victory Records!” That petty stuff doesn’t really matter. I think all of us could have been better at being like, Hey. Let’s look at the big picture here.

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