Surprise! Enter Shikari head on a mission through the darkness to find any kind of light and connection as they drop their brilliant eighth album out of nowhere.
As he has attempted to digest the world and the people who live on it over the past 20 years or so, Rou Reynolds has never been without hope. At its most positive, Enter Shikari’s music has often been a thing of joy and wonder, with the singer and main-brain coming across like a man seeing the brilliance of life and love all at once. When he is angry, frustrated, it is always at something, something in the way of the beautiful and the glorious. The real.
It's this wide umbrella of emotional intelligence that at Download Pilot made Enter Shikari the perfect band to help navigate the catharsis of a year and change under lockdown, to swim through the weird conflicting emotions and come out smiling. It’s also something that feels like a wet rope slipping through Rou’s fingers on Lose Your Self.
Though not musically Enter Shikari’s most intense album, in spirit Lose Your Self is often their most desperate. There is no defiant, Juggernauts-styled rallying cry, or the life-affirming perspective of The Last Garrison. Often, as he grapples to find connection in a world where technology is an increasingly isolating force, the feeling is that he reckons the whole game is fucked.
The music itself remains unique, and Shikari leaders in a field of one. The creative fireworks inside them still burst with imagination, as ever not just adding beats and bloops to rock, but seeing just what can be done with the whole enterprise.
Dead In The Water’s chorus explodes off a clipped beat. On i can’t keep my hands clean, the glitches add to the panicked discordance of violent, Dillinger-ish hardcore, while it’s OK has an almost Oasis-ish chorus (squint, hard), and the opening title-track arrives like Faithless’ Insomnia with a massive nu-metal riff on top. And, actually, it’s all very uplifting.
Where the doubting undercurrent lies is in Rou’s lyrics. ‘Be self-made and infected / Off-grid, disconnected / The individual with no power,’ he almost mocks of the way the online has locked people off from proper connection in the opener titled to encourage a move toward the communal, rather than the lone. On Find Out The Hard Way, he finds himself, ‘Sat in a mushroom cloud,’ asking those who enabled it, ‘Did you make your father proud?’ ‘When everything is dead and gone,’ he snarks, ‘Would you consider that you might’ve been wrong?’
Such fears and cautionary tales aren’t new, but there’s a despair, a sense of uphill struggle to stem the flow of it all, that adds weight. On Dead In The Water, he imagines the final moments of a refugee drowning in the English Channel in a moment where Shikari have never sounded so haunting. The sarcastic it’s Ok, meanwhile, stares open-mouthed at top-level greed and Armageddon preparation by the rich. ‘You too can escape the world’s problems, ’cause fixing them’s a fool’s game,’ Rou seethes. ‘Just hoard wealth, insulate yourself, and no-one else. Like some kind of twisted naked mole rat.’
It's on the album’s three-part Spaceship Earth finale that the journey finds a glimmer of light. In keeping with the artwork’s Carl Sagan referencing idea that our world is a speck of dust in a beam of light, the trio of tracks talk of existence as a ride in a ship, in which Rou attempts to dissect the whole of the human condition in 2026.
In part two, he declares, ‘I’m tired of dreaming / It’s unbearable / I’m in a deep deep sea / Of nothingness.’ But then in the closer, he promises ‘A change is gonna come, my love’ over and over again.
Herein lies the hope, so often absent on Lose Your Self. Because Enter Shikari don’t do nihilism and they don’t do empty cynicism. It’s just the size of the ‘What the fuck?’ examination of the world – and remember, these songs were written before an actual sitting American President threatened to wipe a country off the map over social media – has become so big you have to take much longer to take it all in and unpick it.
After so long, and so many albums, all of this is to be applauded. In music, Enter Shikari are still brilliant. In spirit, they have grown and refined and taken on wisdom without turning into cranks, or simply giving up. And in having the brain and heart to offer an, if not comforting, then friendly unpacking of times as interesting as these, they feel urgent, vital, alive. And in all the madness, never once do they lose themselves.
Verdict: 4/5
For fans of: The Prodigy, Bring Me The Horizon, Carpenter Brut
Lose Your Self is out now via So.
