Refused - New Noise

When Refused released this album, they called it The Shape Of Punk To Come.  Oh, I wish.


This is an epic of a song.  Lyrically, it's a manifesto for the collision of genre's being offered on the album and a statement of defiance, of an unwillingness to conform to ideas of what Punk music was.

They announced proudly, they danced to all the wrong songs.  They did not fit in the narrowing mindset of what is and isn't punk rock.  Good.  For a genre that's origins were entirely about throwing off the shackles of what music should be, many strands of punk became almost aggressively regressive, absolutely unwilling to ascribe the term to anything that wasn't three chords and the truth.

But punk was never that.  At the core of it, Punk was always about being different.  If everyone was playing long keyboard solo's and multipart symphonic rock songs about wizards (not that there's anything wrong with that) then the punk thing to do was to trim everything back to short, hard songs about the truth as you see it.

If someone tells you that what you're playing isn't punk, congratulations, you're doing punk correctly.

Refused understand that implicitly.  Their music is defiant and savage as any sick of it all, but they refuse to be constrained to any one style.  From the techno influence's prominent on New Noise to the jazzy tone's heard elsewhere on the record, they were about doing what you didn't expect.

"How do you expect anyone to listen when you speak with that same old voice?"

Wise words.  Punk had receded to background sound.  Just another genre, that you could count on to be exactly what you might expect.  New Noise uses breakdowns more influenced by trance then by hardcore, with huge riffs used in the way stadium house tracks might peak (indeed the swell of crowd noise that signals the songs climax could easily have come straight from a KLF record)

An unmissable anthem and something to be thrown in the face of anyone who claims something isn't punk.  Punk is defiance.  And you'll never find a more defiant song.

Posted in: Music, Music Review, new noise, punk, refused, techno, the shape of punk to come