Swedish hardcore outfit Raised Fist emerged with its debut LPFuelin 1998.

The band’s sixth LP, last year’s From The North, doesn’t deviate far from the politically-tinged hardcore sound the band has been well known for, but that’s not to say the group has lost its potency. Frontman Alexander ‘Alle’ Hagman says the band laboured intensely over the construction the record, while admitting there was no active attempt to conform to a recognised sound.

“We look back just to compare, because sometimes we made exact copies of other songs, just with different vocal things,” Hagman says. “But we don’t write music to stay a certain way or appeal to an audience of some kind, because we’ve had audiences all through our 22 years so it doesn’t matter. We can’t chase them: they come to us. So we write whatever we think is good and creative and fun and giving and then people automatically find their way to us. We play very hard music and my vocals are sometimes annoying, and still we play 20- to 30,000-capacity festivals.”

Raised Fist formed in 1993, a time when bands such as Rage Against the Machine and Faith No More were enjoying major international popularity. While the band’s career was emboldened by the success of the aforementioned acts, Raised Fist has never gained equivalent commercial attention. Meanwhile, Hagman feels zero affinity with the current crop of punk and hardcore musicians.

“I don’t listen to a lot of punk rock today, or hardcore,” he says. “The new bands, I don’t listen to them at all because I think it’s pretty much just drums and rhythmical build-ups, rather than good music. I don’t want to sound like an old fart saying this, but I think it’s juvenile. It’s easy to write, it’s just mathematical, and you can just get the same BPM going and it’s the same style. That’s something for an uneducated brain to enjoy. To a certain extent everyone can just bang their head to it and it can be good, but if you want to consume that kind of music, I think you have to be under 20 or even under 15 years of age. Otherwise it can’t be that giving. That’s my personal view. It doesn’t bring anything to me.

“I think it’s the same with Christmas. [For children] it’s, ‘I want my presents! I want my presents!’ [For parents] it’s having a good time with friends and enjoying good food. That’s what it is. And you couldn’t understand why your parents said that because everyone knew presents is what you were waiting for. But now when you’re grown up, you can have a good meal, you like to enjoy the company of good friends and that’s kind of the thing with Christmas. It’s the same with music – I think the hardcore and metal scene today is a lot about presents and not so much about having a really good time with your friends.”

Such a moment seems like an appropriate point to steer Hagman towards conversations about what makes him tick, rather than allowing the chat to become an all-out harangue regarding the moral and aesthetic failings of today’s gratification-hungry youth. Hagman is all to eager to oblige.

“When you listen to Rage Against The Machine they have a very groovy sound, but there’s a core to it, a soul within the lyrics and the music and everything,” he says. “That gives you the fucking nerve. That’s what brings me to the record store, to iTunes, to Spotify or whatever.” 20-odd years after the band’s formation, this blueprint continues to inspire Hagman and his Raised Fist bandmates. That said, they remain open to all sorts of stylistic possibilities.

“With Raised Fist, I don’t want it to just be a hard [sounding] thing where you throw away the opportunity to write something that you really, really love. Instead we do it like this: when we start the writing process it’s like, ‘Show me what you have and it doesn’t matter what it is’. If it’s pop, it’s pop. If it’s rock, it’s rock. If it’s hard rock, if it’s metal, if it’s hardcore, whatever – put it out there. ‘Does it have a beautiful thing to it? OK, this is good.’

“If you listen to Veil Of Ignorance, for example, you have an instrumental song there at the end, ‘Out’. What kind of music is that? Is it hardcore? Is it metal? Is it pop? Is it rock? That’s why we have our own place amongst all the genres you can find, because we just take the music and then we just put it out there. We can’t even say, ‘What kind of music is this?’ It’s just good.”

One thing’s for sure: Raised Fist have always made very aggressive music, and From The North againconveys a palpable anti-establishment message. The band will return to Australia this November and December, making it almost two years since From The North came out.

Despite this, time has healed none of the group’s wounds, and we can still expect plenty of genuine vehemence.

“We want our music to be explosive, we want it to have a certain power to it, we want it to be like you go fucking crazy when you listen to it, and when you play it live you blow yourself up.”

[Raised Fist photo by Richard Kårström]

Raised Fist play at Metro Theatre on Friday December 2.From The North is out now through Epitaph.

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