Enter Shikari: “Performing is, simply, what we were born to be doing”

“I’m getting a lump in my throat just thinking about it,” Rob begins as he recalls Shikari’s Download heroics. “We’d been gone for so long that it felt like we really needed that validation from the audience. There was a weird feeling that we didn't know where we stood with our fans – we were wondering if we were still such a big part of their lives. But then we came out, we played, and the audience were just going wild and absolutely loving it. In that moment, we'd felt never felt stronger, and the connection with our fans also felt stronger than ever before.”

An experience guitarist Rory Clewlow describes as “pure ecstasy”, headlining Download Pilot signalled the rebirth of Enter Shikari; the band completed by vocalist Rou Reynolds and bassist Chris Batten. The pandemic had crushed their spirits, stifled their creativity and stunted the momentum behind their sensational sixth album Nothing Is True & Everything Is Possible. Playing at Donington, though, reaffirmed the joy of being in Enter Shikari. Even the shittiest parts of touring life felt like a blessing.

“I woke up on the bus to the sound of subs being tested,” Chris remembers, a smile plastered across his face. “That’s something that, ordinarily, would’ve annoyed me, but I didn’t realise how much I’d missed it.”

“All those gruelling early morning trips to the airport, all those times you’re trying to get to sleep on the bus while people are farting and snoring around you, those are things you don’t think you’ll miss, but when they’re taken away, you desperately want them back,” Rob adds. “Download felt like going from nothing and the prospect that this could be the end of the band, to suddenly being back on top, bigger and better than we’d ever been.”

Largely, it’s all smiles as the members of Enter Shikari reflect on Download Pilot, but frontman Rou is a little more philosophical as he recounts the band’s live return. The deep thinker and visionary among Shikari’s ranks, he’s not as quick or eager as the others to regale Kerrang! with his memories of that June weekend, and swiftly moves on to the more solemn aspects of the experience.

“It was great,” he says. “But it was such a little morsel. It was like, ‘Remember this? Well, now you can’t have it for another six months.’ That period essentially became an extension of 2020 – there was a lot of weirdness, a lot of thumb-twiddling, and a lot of questioning who we are, what we’re doing and what our purpose is.”

Rou’s words are accompanied by a nervous laugh that speaks to the emotional wringer that the band have been put through across the last two years’ worth of lockdowns. When we caught up with him at the end of 2020, he spoke of how the pandemic had led to Enter Shikari “essentially experiencing the death of the band”, his words echoing the impact of coronavirus on artists around the world. Countless stories have been told in recent months of the distress – both financial and mental – that the pandemic caused for musicians, with many naturally turning to songwriting as an outlet for their despair. Already, COVID-influenced songs and albums by the likes of Bring Me The Horizon and Wage War have emerged, but for Enter Shikari and Rou in particular, global catastrophe had the opposite effect. Twelve months ago, he spoke of how he’d “not written a single thing” throughout 2020.

“The more I keep saying it, the more it frightens me,” he admitted.

A year on, those fears remain very much present in his mind.

“I had the complete halting of creativity,” he explains. “That was something I didn’t expect. Things were bad enough, but to then suddenly realise that, ‘Oh, I don’t seem to be able to write music anymore,' which is something that’s always been there for me, it felt like a double-hit on top of cancelling the shows. That outlet of human creativity was everything to me, and then it was just taken away.”

It cannot be underestimated the extent to which the loss of creative instinct can affect an artist, particularly when, as is the case with Rou, that artist has been creating for as long as they can remember. The absence of the ability to write music left a gaping hole for the Enter Shikari leader, and one that couldn’t be filled by the other thing he’d been doing all his life: playing shows. The outlook was gloomy, but there was one thing Rou and the rest of the band could still rely on – albeit not in the way they were used to.

“When everything went to shit, all we could count on was our audience and our supporters,” Rou says. “Those people – the kind of people that read and support platforms like Kerrang! and bands like ours – made sure that Nothing Is True & Everything Is Possible could still happen, and in the months after it came out, it was the digital connection we were still able to maintain with them that stopped us from falling headfirst into a pit of despair.”

For Rory, the ‘what’ ended up being time spent at home with his family, a period he credits as one that led to him becoming “a more well-rounded person, thanks to a lot of personal growth”.

“It’s a bit cliché,” he continues, “but when life kicks you in the balls, it’s often the case that something good and unexpected can come from that. For me, that was sorting out a lot of my issues outside of the band, and also becoming more appreciative of how special what we’ve built with Enter Shikari is.”

Rou’s experiences of this time, as he’s already hinted, don’t sound quite as wholesome. While one might expect a songwriter with a world view as progressive and passionate as his to instantly throw everything at a sonic response to global shutdown, Rou says he ultimately felt “a real sense of impotence and despair” at seeing the pandemic being so horrendously mismanaged by world leaders. After writing and singing about the failures of those who govern us for so long, watching their catastrophic failures come to light in such a tragic way did nothing to inspire him to pen new Shikari material.

Rou puts it best, albeit in a rather bleak manner.

“There is absolutely no joy in being proved right about this stuff,” he says. “I didn’t expect lockdown and my inability to write to be so intrinsically linked, but I think, ultimately, the fact that Enter Shikari have been warning about these structural defects for so long was the reason I couldn’t write when faced with all of it. I just felt a bit sick, like this cocktail of emotions and righteous indignation had got the best of me. I was just sat there thinking, ‘Look, look! Can’t you see?!’”

It might not have felt like it at the time, but there are – and have long been – plenty of people around the globe who are deeply connected to what Rou and the rest of Enter Shikari shout so fervently about, and who appreciate the platform and community they’ve built.

Rob points to the overwhelmingly positive response to Nothing Is True & Everything Is Possible, as well as Rou’s recent book A Treatise On Possibility: Perspectives On Humanity Hereafter, as evidence of the “importance” of what the band write and the fact that it is something “people need to hear” – especially in light of recent events.

“What we write about is extremely valid,” he says of Shikari’s material and its relevance to the current world order. “The reaction we’ve continued to have over the past couple of years has given us the confidence to continue doing it all and to not be afraid to say how we feel, whatever the hurdles. We’ve been writing music with these themes for over a decade, and they’ve never been as important as they are now.”

Eventually, the sense of purpose with which Rob speaks began to stir in Rou once more, signalling the start of Enter Shikari’s next chapter. Witnessing what he describes as “a new generation of passion and determination” in people seeking to learn the lessons of the pandemic and forge a better path, the fire and determination of the frontman returned, with the band finally able to look to the future, emboldened and energised by a renewed faith in their cause and their community.

Enter Shikari’s reconciliation with the live arena has also strengthened the prospect that their attentions will soon turn to new music and other exciting plans. Rob reveals that while the four-piece haven’t sat down specifically to work on a new record, he is in “no doubt” that material of some kind will emerge in 2022, explaining that the band have been experimenting with ideas and that there’s some “exciting stuff bubbling in the pipework”, along with plans to be active on next summer’s festival circuit.

Rou, meanwhile, is hopeful that these shows will lead to a “spark” fuelled by their fans that they can pour into new music. He speaks of how he anticipates the next phase of Enter Shikari could well be characterised by an “unbearable anger” at what the band have witnessed in recent times, while he’s also trying to take the positives from a year that has felt creatively barren.

“I’m hoping that the time we’ve had away from writing will allow us to reflect, grow, and approach things in a different way, or at least from a different angle” he says. “It feels like we’re coming into the writing process with fresh eyes, and while I don’t know exactly how that will affect the music, I think the impact could be pretty big, because we’ve never gone two years like this without writing music before – I’ve been writing music non-stop since I was nine! So this really feels like a full stop, new paragraph situation for the band.”

So does that mean Enter Shikari’s creative fire is back?

The answer, it seems, is yes.

“We’ve been working hard to get everything in place for this tour, and I know it’s going to be fucking immense, but once that’s done, the focus will all be on writing,” Rou concludes. “The idea is that now, finally, we can think about writing a new album – that’s my sole focus. I’m currently working out what exactly it is that I need to do in order to exorcise the demons that will get me writing again, but even though we’re only early into this current run of shows, I’ve had moments when I’ve been walking offstage where I’ve felt that urge of, ‘Oh god – I need to write something right now!’ That’s a feeling I haven’t felt in so long.

“Finally, I’m looking forward to immersing myself in that urge, and delivering something new.”

Enter Shikari are on tour in the UK now until December 21. They will play Reading & Leeds in August 2022.