Genre Bending Rock Outfit Enter Shikari Kick Start Their Australian Tour This Week

Genre bending rock outfit Enter Shikari return to Australia for their first headline tour since 2022 starting this week, following last year’s festival appearances at Knotfest that reaffirmed their status as one of the most captivating live bands in modern music. Armed with new album Lose Yourself which was dropped a month ago with no announcements or teasers spans 12 tracks exploring themes of desolation, futility and complete despair at the state of the world, but with glimmers of hopefulness and optimism threaded throughout. Drummer Rob Rolfe talks to Hi Fi Way about the album and tour.

Everything leading up to this tour screams excitement. Is that how the band’s feeling at the moment?
Yeah, well the really exciting thing for us is being able to play some of the new music. We’ve been playing the rest of our set for many years now, some of the songs we’ve been playing for over twenty years. So to get the chance to play the new tracks, and to an audience like the Australians who are always excellent to us, is good. Although we normally come over in the middle of our winter and your summer, but now we’re coming into summer here and you’re going into winter, so I don’t think we timed it very well for our mid‑winter sun holiday topping up the tan.

Inside a week to go, you’ve got that big flight, what do you look forward to most about touring Australia?
That’s an interesting question. One thing is it’s nice being able to have hotels. There’s a slight sense of comfort in that we have hotel rooms as opposed to a tour bus. You don’t really do tour buses over there, or there’s some weird law that if the bus is driving you have to be set up with a seatbelt on, and the drives are so long that it just makes it ridiculous. So there’s a level of comfort to it and the audiences are really good. We find Enter Shikari fans are pretty similar all over the world in how fanatical they can get and their excitement during the gig, but the Australians just seem to have a relaxed vibe about them. I think we share a lot of similar comedy and language, we’re not afraid of swearing as well, so it makes us feel at home. The food, yeah.

I love the new album. How did you keep that under wraps for so long without even dropping a subtle hint it was coming?
It was tough, especially because in the lead‑up to it, in our camp and everyone around us, we’d been talking about it non-stop. So you think, if everyone I know knows about it, then surely everyone knows about it. But no, our team did very well keeping any whispers off the internet. They’d be putting out little fires in dark corners of the internet if a bit of artwork leaked here or the track listing leaked there. They did extremely well, and we were happily surprised the music didn’t get leaked before release, because that’s what we were all worried about the most.

We had a show the night before the release, it came out at midnight, and we had a tiny show in Manchester with some hardcore fans. At the very end of the set, Rou said, “We’ve got a new album coming out at midnight tonight. Lose Yourself.” And that was it. Put the mic down and walked off stage. The excitement those few words gave the room was palpable. We could tell we’d done a good job keeping it a secret. We had to deliver the album early because vinyl pressing takes so long, like four months, so it was finished before Christmas. Sitting on this finished product, waiting to release it without any preamble or singles, was fun. A fun way to do it.

I love that you went against every standard convention, no singles, no promotion. It’s the opposite of what everyone else is doing.
It was the complete opposite of how we’ve released all our other albums. Especially with the last one, getting number one in the UK album charts, we really hammered home the pre‑sales and were sort of forcing it, asking people to buy it before it was released. It felt quite stressful. So this time, to just go “boom, there you go, have it,” took a lot of the stress out for us. It almost felt more like a gift, thanking everyone for the effort they put in with the last one. Here you go, you can just have this one in its entirety.

What it means for the listener is that no one song has been pushed. They get to hear the entire thing as one piece of art from start to finish, they’re forced to, really. We put so much work into the structure of the album as a whole, the thematic threads, how each song links up. Many of the songs blend into each other, whether that’s actual crossovers or simpler transitions. So it’s nice to present it as one body of work instead of just a collection of songs, which it would’ve felt more like had we released a bunch of singles beforehand.

Compared to any other album, have you been blown away by the impact this one has already had on fans?
Yeah, online you always get the really vocal people saying they love the album, and that’s great, it boosts our ego, obviously. But when you really see it is when you play it live. A couple of weeks ago we played some of the new tracks, and the reaction was just as big, if not bigger, than songs we’ve been playing for twenty years and fans had only had the album a few days. They knew every word, they were jumping up and down, seeing that means more to us than online praise. It’s the best gauge because before release you don’t really know if it’s good anymore. You’ve heard it so much you lose perspective. So seeing people connect with it first hand is the best feeling.

Was it clear in your mind what you wanted to do with Lose Yourself and the direction you wanted to take it sonically?
No, not really. A lot of the music was written years ago, so it was pieced together slowly. Recording happened in little chunks, sometimes at Vada, a studio a couple hours away, sometimes down south in Chichester where we set up a studio in a barn. But it was always broken up by touring, holidays, life events. It felt disjointed until the very end when we were cramming to finish it. We’d leave it for a while, come back, and have to reacquaint ourselves with what we’d written. Luckily every time we came back we thought, “Oh, this is really good,” and felt re‑energised. By the end we realised it’s actually quite a dark, heavy album, not intentionally, but naturally. Probably a reflection of the world right now: anxiety, dark times. But there’s always that core theme of hope and unity, that we can get through it together.

One of the most fascinating tracks for me is Spaceship Earth. What was the idea behind doing it in three parts?
That was Rou. He loved the idea of having essentially one song presented in three different ways. It was a fun artistic experiment for us. You’ve got the punk rock version, then the dancey electronic version, then the classical version. It was kind of taking a leaf out of classical composers’ books.

Do you think that might be a nod to where you’ll go next, exploring the Enter Shikari sound even further?
Possibly. Honestly, I have no idea where we’re going next. I can’t even think a month ahead, let alone about new music. Getting this album finished and out into the world has taken a lot out of us. That’s all I can think about right now.

So what’s next for Enter Shikari? There’s a lot of touring this year, but anything else planned heading into next year?
We’ve got all sorts of bits and pieces, lots of touring. Next year we may also have a lot on, but I can’t talk about that yet.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Enter Shikari on the following dates, tickets from Destroy All Lines…