Refused officially split up, announce farewell tour

As they’ve famously said before: Refused Are Fucking Dead.

Not for the first time, the iconic Swedish hardcore punks have announced their break-up, with plans say goodbye to North America with a tour in 2025, and wrap things up in their home country at the end of the year.

An extremely in-depth statement from drummer David Sandström announces that, “We were supposed to do this in May. Roll out our modest farewell run, starting with the Rosendal Garden Party in Stockholm and then doing a few shows here and there 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 secret show at Kulturhuset Femman in Uppsala. There were no pictures taken and it wasn’t filmed 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 [Lyxzén, vocals], 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. That’s how long ago it was. 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 four Gorilla Biscuits songs, a Shelter song, an AC/DC song and I think three original compositions to a crowd of 50-60 blind drunk northerners. I had just turned 17, had never travelled outside of Sweden 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 is 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 ’90s 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. Kristofer [Steen, guitars] felt that he’d done what he wanted to do and 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 ’90s 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 on to the good news: Dennis is doing great. He’s one of the healthiest dudes I know, he can’t sit still, exercises a lot and it follows that his recuperation would be swift. He’s gotten excellent care and his doctor has run all the physical tests on him and they all indicate he’s making a full recovery. Needless to say, he’s itching to get back on tour to play shows and he even suggested we should keep preliminary dates set up for the late fall and winter, but we decided to postpone those shows and instead start up in the spring. So yeah, that’s where we’re at. We’re coming to the U.S. in March/April 2025 and we’re looking at what else we can do with the rest of the year, all we know is that we want to finish back home in Sweden at the end of the year. 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.”

Check out the tour dates below:

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