Enter Shikari put the Rou into rowdy with unstoppable live album.
“London, I could dance with you all night long,” declares Rou Reynolds near the start of this live album, recorded at Enter Shikari's sold-out Wembley Arena show in 2024. “For the next one-and-a-half hours, the world outside of these walls ceases to exist.”
And that, of course, is what the best live shows can do: suspend your disbelief at whatever shit is going down in the universe at large, in favour of losing yourself in a memory-making moshpit.
Transferring that feeling to record isn’t always easy, but it helps that the Wembley audience certainly seemed to take Rou’s advice on board, sounding here like the most feral live album crowd this side of Motörhead’s No Sleep ‘Til Hammersmith. And, even for those of us only listening (or watching – the eye-popping video version will streamed on YouTube on release day) at home, more than a year after the fact, this lengthy-but-never-tedious recording seethes with enough belligerent energy to start a wall of death in an empty bedroom.
While Enter Shikari’s legendary festival appearances are often of the smash-and-grab variety, here – given the time and space of their biggest ever headline show – Rou and co take care to showcase their versatility. Before then setting fire to everything in sight, obviously.
So, alongside the standard issue electro-metal mayhem, there’s also a dramatic spoken word intro; a touchingly tender acoustic section (The Pressure’s On, Juggernauts, Gap In The Fence); some live remix treatments (including a bone-shuddering Anaesthetist); a surprising amount of trumpetry and all-in special guest appearances from Fever 333/LetLive frontman Jason Aalon Butler (Losing My Grip) and, er, perma-smiley Eurovision survivor Sam Ryder (going full Freddie Mercury on Satellites**).
Which is why, whether you were within Wembley’s four walls at the time or not, this is one live album guaranteed to get you up and dancing.
Verdict: 4/5
For fans of: Bring Me The Horizon, Pitchshifter, The Prodigy
Live At Wembley is released on July 11 via SO Recordings/Ambush Reality
