Enter Shikari Returns to America & Reaches for the Stars
Photos by Danny Hernandez
Words by Ashley Altus
For years Enter Shikari has captivated crowds with their high-spirited stage presence and passionate live sets in underground clubs to international music festivals. From dangling on ceiling beams to performing in the seas of sweat-drenched fans pushing to the front of the barricade, for frontman Rou Reynolds, music is about living in the moment. He wants the crowd to feel alive.
“You want an emotional response. It can be any emotion really,” Reynolds says.
North American fans have been waiting in suspense for the last year to be mesmerized by Enter Shikari’s explosive energy. The Mindsweep, the band’s fourth studio album, was still new to fans during their first North American tour in 2015, where they were joined by supporting acts Stray from the Path, A Lot Like Birds and I the Mighty. Fans have had the past year to memorize every lyric of the album. Coming along for the ride on this run of The Mindsweep Tour are Hands Like Houses and the White Noise.
Enter Shikari is giving back to local bands on this tour circuit. Many of the tour dates have local bands opening the shows. Reynolds reminisces on how his band started off putting on and promoting their own shows and how it was a big deal when local bands would open for a big headliner.
“It’s just something we want to reciprocate,” Reynolds says.
Besides giving back to local music communities around the U.S. and Canada, the band is also playing outdoor festivals such as Monster Energy’s Welcome to Rockville in Jacksonville, Florida and Rock City Campground in Concord, North Carolina. The opportunity to play festivals in the open air with temperate weather excites Reynolds. In North America, the band often plays dark and dingy venues. While this may give fans an intimate experience, Reynolds loves playing outside. It feels almost primitive to him.
“Something about playing music under the sky just feels right,” Reynolds says. “It’s what humans have been doing for centuries.”
The Mindsweep Tour gives the band the chance to play their newest single, “Redshift,” for a North American audience. The track was released about a year after the release of The Mindsweep, even though the song and the album were written around the same time period. Reynolds says the band felt the song did not flow with the album, which is why they held onto it.
“It just felt like the right thing to do, to just release it by itself as a one off,” Reynolds says. “It was such a different sound for us.”
The politically-charged music found on the album in songs like, “The Last Garrison,” and “Anaesthetist,” weren’t cohesive with the lyrical content of “Redshift” about the vast magnificence of the cosmos and outer space, exploring the concept of the universe accelerating and expanding.
Reynolds says fans have gotten to the point where they expect the band to always be producing something different. Their music diversifies between heavier and lighter sounds. Reynolds says the music for “Redshift” needed to be lighter to represent the grandiosity and epic nature of the topic.
“It felt like the music had to be equally harmonious and reflect the grand melodic nature of the discoveries in cosmology and astrophysics,” Reynolds says.
Reynolds takes inspiration from anything scientific on the cutting edge of human knowledge. For “Redshift,” he drew influences from the progress made in cosmology throughout the 20th century and the work of leaders in the field like theoretical physicist and cosmologist Lawrence Krauss.
Enter Shikari’s lyrics defy the clichés of the “girl on the dance floor” or a heart-wrenching breakup song. For Reynolds, those subjects have been done too many times. Instead, he aspires to write music about topics that haven’t been written about before like cosmology, and prefers to stick to themes that provoke social change like many of the tracks off The Mindsweep.
Reynolds believes it is the job of a musician in the punk scene to speak out against social injustices and corruption, but feels as if it has fallen off the radar for some bands who define their music as punk. Instead of being inspired by the music scene he’s in regarding these movements, he finds it in genres like hip hop and spoken word. To fit Reynolds’s preferred criteria as an artist in the punk scene, bands need to be influenced by honesty and integrity rather than monetizing off of fame. Reynolds expresses strong feelings towards bands that offer paid meet and greets at shows.
“It’s just about the most un-punk thing you can do,” Reynolds says. “It’s gotten to the stage now where bands are literally looking for any way to commoditize any and everything they do. It’s literally just prostituting yourself in literally any way you can, and this is something punk fought against.”
Even though Reynolds believes the definition of punk has been distorted, he still fights to fuel activism and social consciousness.
“Music doesn’t literally change the world,” Reynolds says. “It can embolden people to carry on doing whatever it is they’re doing politically or in a society.”
You’ll have to get your weepy breakup song elsewhere, because Enter Shikari wants you to take action.
