#61, "New Noise," Refused (1999)

50 Favorite Songs: #61, "New Noise," Refused (1999)

Man, this song sounded like it came right the fuck out of the future the first time I heard it. Nothing anyone else was doing sounded anything like it. Guitars and electronic instruments and shouty voices—all that shit was old hat, but nobody was using them like this. Nobody was trying to say anything with them, and nobody was trying to make a point about what music had the potential to sound like in the future because of it. Refused called the album that "New Noise" came from The Shape Of Punk To Come, and that's the sort of shit that would be super arrogant, except that, in hindsight, the only thing that they got wrong was that they were too optimistic.

Because "New Noise" is more interesting than so much of what followed it. Refused laid out a blueprint here of what aggressive music could be—political, but not preachy; full of electronic elements, but not just pointless appropriation; big and noisy and angry, but joyful; personal, but not self-obsessed. I wish that the "punk to come" had followed that blueprint, because most of what we got were boys talking about how much they hated their ex-girlfriends, or affecting the disaffected attitudes that people had played up twenty years prior. Most of the bands who wanted to explode wanted to explode in ways that bands had been exploding for a very long time. Refused wanted to make new noise. And to be sure that people would notice, they called it "New Noise," called the album The Shape Of Punk To Come like a direct challenge, and no one took them up on it. Which is too bad—the record is twenty-five years old now, and it still sounds like it came from the future.