Punk rock and hardcore punk have created a punk subculture in Sweden since punk music became popular in the 1970s. The most famous Swedish punk band was Ebba Grön, followed KSMB, but other notable bands were Asta Kask, Grisen Skriker, Kriminella Gitarrer, The Pain and Göteborg Sound. In the 1980s hardcore punk, kängpunk and crust punk became popular in Sweden. The two perhaps most influential bands are Mob 47 and Anti Cimex, whose music has also inspired many foreign bands. Some other examples of influential bands is Moderat Likvidation, Black Uniforms, Totalitär and Avskum. Together with the early American hardcore bands and the British band Discharge, the Swedish punk scene since the early 1990s consisted almost exclusively of "tribute bands" to the above. In the 1990s the crust punk was still going strong with bands like Driller Killer, Skitsystem, Wolfbrigade, and Disfear.
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The genre is in Sweden also connected with the hardcore scene that emerged in Umeå and other northern cities in the 1990s, with bands such as Refused (Umeå) and Raised Fist (Luleå) in the lead. Refused had a strong base in the genre's traditional roots and may in part represent how it sounded then, but experimented and stretched the limits sufficiently to their most famous songs rather have come under the term post-hardcore.
The majority of the genre called melodic hardcore influenced later skate punk/pop punk into what it became in the 1990s. This also created a Swedish subgenre called trallpunk, a style of music with catchy melodies, fast drum speed and narrative texts, often left-wing political lyrics, and unlike the faster hardcore punk, straight to the point lyrics. Notable trallpunk bands include De lyckliga kompisarna, Strebers and Radioaktiva räker.
In the 2000s a lot of old Swedish punk bands such as Asta Kask, Dia Psalma, Mob 47, Moderat Likvidation and De lyckliga kompisarna reunited with most of them releasing new albums with new songs. This decade a lot of hardcore punk bands from Umeå and northern Sweden started to play more pop influenced punk and the early Swedish punk like Ebba Grön and KSMB, for example Invasionen with Dennis Lyxzén from Refused and Knugen Faller with Inge Johansson from Totalt Jävla Mörker.