Enter Shikari: “We have to lose the idea of the self and become much more focused on wholeness and oneness”

News of a pending Shikari album broke an hour or so before release, announced onstage when the band returned to Manchester’s Satan’s Hollow – one of the best rock clubs in the country – for the first time in 20 years. Quite the anniversary present for a band who will be playing the city’s 25,000-capacity Co-op Live arena later in the year.

“The last time we played there was an extremely raucous affair,” Rou recalls. “Our main memory of it is Chris [Batten, bass] getting bottled (laughs). I think it was an accident, someone threw a pint glass or something, but it was quite an eventful show!”

Having grown up in the fertile and ferocious Hertfordshire punk scene of the early-mid-’00s, no matter how many arenas the band play, there’s something about the chaos and seeing the whites in fans’ eyes that keeps Shikari tethered to their DIY roots. Indeed, on album release day, they announce a string of underplays for later this month, and their autumn arena tour will donate £1 from every ticket sold to the Music Venue Trust.

Surprise albums and super-intimate shows aren’t exactly on the menu for many (or any) bands of Shikari’s size or stature. Having achieved the elusive Number One album and headlined Wembley Arena with 2023’s A Kiss For The Whole World, they could have so easily found themselves in the business of chasing accolades and trying to capitalise on some invisible metric for the sake of arbitrary growth. But doing things as expected has never been Shikari’s modus operandi.

“We’re not really that success-led,” Rou considers, adding that they often struggle to enjoy the wins. “A Number One, it’s such an obvious, physical thing in reality that you can point toward and measure your career against. It’s important that we do sit with those things, but I don’t think that they determine what we do.

“The direction we go and things we want to do are sort of led by instinct and the conversations between us and what we’re excited about. Luckily, we’re conscious of the rat race and hedonic treadmill and that, ‘Okay, what’s next?!’ is just an endless thing and there’s no satisfaction if you keep thinking like that. It’s a dangerous game because it can destroy you on a personal level.”

What’s next – or to be more precise, what’s now – then, is Lose Your Self. The St. Albans’ crew’s excellent eighth offering, which bursts with imagination and ingenuity, pushing the form and tossing out any supposition of what a Shikari record should or could be.

Meticulously “tapped away at” for a period of three years, Rou admits the drawn-out process was “quite unsatisfying”, compared to previous records’ more destination-based approaches, having previously hunkered down for weeks in the Isle Of Wight and Thailand, and more recently a solar-powered Sussex farmhouse for A Kiss For The Whole World.

But more than the location of its creation, a clearer point of difference between Lose Your Self and their last LP is the record’s purview.

“A Kiss For The Whole World, even the title, it’s colourful, it’s peaceful, it’s hopeful. There’s a lot less of that on this record, it’s definitely darker,” Rou acknowledges. “That’s not to say it doesn’t have its moments of lightness and hope, but these things are instinctual. I don’t want to be an optimist or a pessimist, I want to be a realist, but a lot of it is a reflection of the world that we’re experiencing.”

Was there any kind of desire or even self-imposed responsibility to reflect the times we’re living in?

“I don’t worry about it, that just happens. If I think about it too much it would make me go insane (laughs). How do you prioritise what to say in this day and age, when every aspect of life has some sort of real structural problem? It’s impossible to sit down rationally and be like, ‘Right we’re going to make an album about this and this because this needs to be said,’ because you’d lose your mind.

“I just work on instinct and leave that to the subconscious…”

This knowledge that we are stronger together and that the world would operate so much better if we removed narcissism, ego and greed from power structures informs standout track Find Out The Hard Way. Ruminating on the song’s meaning, Rou laughs that, “It’s this darkly comical idea that we know we’re right.”

“If you look at possible disaster scenarios – of which there are many on a global scale at the moment – what is it going to take for the narcissist and dark triad people in control of the world and in positions of power to realise the paths that they’re setting us on? Is it going to take complete catastrophe? Are we going to have to find out the hard way that we’re all one? It’s that typical thing of the scientist in the disaster movie that no-one’s paying any attention to who’s like, ‘Guys, guys! Hold on a minute!’ And he just looks around bewildered and dismayed at what’s going on.”

As well as the complete destruction of life as we know it at the selfish hands of others, Find Out The Hard Way focuses its gaze on the literal transactional nature of social media (‘All my friends have been monetised’), how we’re being forced to present ourselves and brands, and all the sleazy grifting that goes along with it.

“That idea of constantly having to sell yourself isn’t something anyone is really comfortable with when they actually think about it, but it’s something we’re all forced into with the current structure and way of doing things. We get by in any way we can and that often forces us into realms that we don’t want to go, but we start to justify to ourselves, especially when they’re completely normalised. ‘Oh, you don’t have three side-hustles outside of your job? You’re not branding yourself in the correct way? You need to catch up!’ There’s a lot of pressure.”

And the pressure doesn’t just exist for the content creators and influencers that fill up our carefully-curated algorithms, finding niches in everything from roaming supermarket aisles to pulling Pokémon cards. An entire generation of artists finding their footing are now having to split their time between making music and running a TikTok empire.

Rou lets out a sigh.

“I’d fucking hate coming up as a band now. I feel lucky that we did when we did. It’s an unnatural thing: if you take an average creative, sensitive person, they’re not going to excel as salespeople, and they’re not going to enjoy and feel fulfilled as salespeople by being pressured into constantly being so. It’s an awkward, uncomfortable scenario that we’re in at the moment.”

So uncomfortable is Rou with the concept of social media and its many attention-hogging, dopamine-draining trappings, he is currently enjoying time off the apps and away from the infinite doomscroll.

“I have been and am completely overwhelmed,” he explains. “It’s a constant balancing act and there’s so much damage that can be done just by the pressure of wanting to feel informed all the time. A lot of the time you don’t get any growth from that, you actually stagnate because you’re in a loop of panic, and it’s not until you disconnect from it all and allow yourself to process things that you gain a bit of perspective.”

For someone who prides himself on his passion for learning and understanding the world around him – remember, this is a man who wrote a 288-page deep dive into the potential of human endeavour and the ecological destruction we find ourselves in – unplugging from the mainframe is easier said than done, but has become a necessity. They say that ignorance is bliss, and sometimes we forget to prioritise our own happiness in the pursuit of answers that ultimately only provide more questions.

“I have to learn and relearn this throughout my life: self-care is so important. The more in-touch with everything that’s going on and keeping up with the news cycle [that you are], the more that takes over your life, the less you’re able to do.

“Recently, I’ve had a mad period and I’m still coming through it, and no matter how many times you learn it, you have to be so disciplined. I never want to make it sound like I am telling people, ‘We have to act like this.’ All I want people to do is to allow some space into their lives to think of the bigger picture, and then you can perhaps have the energy to prioritise things. Otherwise burnout is waiting like a fucking jackal to tear us all apart.”

This idea is expanded further in the opening title-track, in which Rou sings, ‘You're suspended in a light beam, to transcend it, you gotta lose your self,’ riffing on a quote by astronomer Carl Sagan (also the influence for 2016 single Redshift) who wrote in his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot that the entirety of humanity is merely a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”.

It must be quite liberating to know that, in the grand scheme of things, we don’t matter.

“It puts everything in perspective,” Rou offers. “Not in a nihilistic way, but we’re so small and we’re just living on this tiny blue speck in the middle of a vacuum. For me, seeing that perspective makes some of the aspects of our lives and the way we structure our lives completely fucking mental. Every now and then you need to slap the narcissists in charge of our world around the face and force them to sit with that picture and meditate on it. And then get them to try and justify the things that they’re doing. In that respect, I find it really inspiring.

“But we’re using the light beam in a different way. It’s a beam that’s sucking us into the digitalisation and relying on technology, but not at all updating our wisdom as we update our technology.”

Even in the space of three years between Shikari records, the conversations around technology have radically changed, specifically the proliferation of AI and the ease to which it has flooded all forms of media. From artificially generated artists on Spotify like The Velvet Sundown, to its impact on job losses and likeness rights in Hollywood, to the countless terabytes of meaningless sludge that clog up our feeds.

“People are sick of AI slop already. We’re bludgeoned by it,” Rou says, clearly having spent a lot of time contemplating the matter. “I think there are definitely positives [to AI]. There are super-interesting aspects of music technology that AI makes possible. I was speaking to a mate the other night who was making a song with his little one, who’s about four or five, just making a silly song together. And when it’s providing human connection and that is its purpose, that is great, but often it’s not doing that. The promise was that it would take away the menial jobs and aspects of our lives, but quite often it goes for the creative, imaginative pursuits, which is such a problem.

“I have quite a few artist friends, comic artists and things like that, and the work of theirs that it’s stealing in order to inform its own output is something that really needs to be addressed and they need to be compensated for. Just in the same way is happening in music. There are huge negatives and repercussions economically, but there is a lot of good to it as well. If we had AI outside of this neoliberal capitalist framework, it would be very different and it would be used in more sustainable or thoughtful ways, rather than this splurge of what we’re seeing that is profit-driven.”

Have you not been tempted to ask ChatGPT to make an Enter Shikari song?

“A mate did, and it actually filled me with confidence. It just created a bland, disjointed thing that sort of sounds like it. We’re kind of lucky because you never know what to expect from us, and we’ve changed and broadened our sound with every album. If someone said, ‘This is a new song by Enter Shikari’ and it sounded like a jumble of what we’d done before, I think people would know that it wasn’t us.”

That progressive, ambitious, interstellar sound of Enter Shikari comes to a grand crescendo in the trifecta of movements that close the album, harnessing Rou’s love of classical music, under the umbrella of Spaceship Earth. A term coined by British economist Barbara Ward in her 1966 book of the same name, it’s a thought experiment that positions the planet as a spaceship with finite resources, forcing the crew (humanity) to think differently about consumption and production.

“You start to think about things in a kind of rational way,” Rou picks up. "Like, how much fuel do we have in this spaceship? Where are we heading? What are the protocols? Is everyone chipping in to keep this spaceship a safe place? There’s the vacuum of space out there, we need to be prudent and frugal.

“I think it’s a beautiful thing to explore creatively. From Spaceship Earth (I. Avec Abandon) I’m acting as this character who is welcoming people aboard and has his foot on the pedal to the metal, this joyride through space, which is what it feels like we’re doing at the moment. And then as we go on to other movements, we put forward different perspectives.”

But what is the conclusion of the experiment? Rou admits that the last verse of Spaceship Earth (III. Maestoso) “is probably the most trite I’ve allowed our lyrics to be”, as it closes with the yearning, ‘Hold on, hold on, a change is going to come…’

Change, of course, can come in many forms. So what specifically does Rou want to see?

“Everything. Everything. Absolutely everything,” he says bluntly. “It’s hard to think of things that don’t need to be updated or need complete overhauls at the moment. You speak to any person in any industry or walk of life and they’ll gladly sit you down and speak about all the problems in their area, but as I’ve always said, usually you follow those problems to their core and there lies the problem – which is the structure. The idea that we must exploit each other and the natural world, and that is the natural order of things, when it is absolutely false.”

Even if the message is a trite one, however, at least the prospect of change offers hope. And sometimes hope is all we have.

“You have to hold onto it. If you don’t have hope you’re not going to act. It’s the structural foundation that every kind of progress builds from.”

As Kerrang! bids farewell to our intrepid rambler, we look back on the litany of broad, existential crises covered over the course of our hour together, from the rise of AI to the continued abuse of the environment to the loss of community values.

“It’s all part of the same problem,” Rou says, pulling his various conversational threads tighter. “The more you lose the sense of self, and the sense of individualism and self-maximalisation, the more you will discover the truth, which is not just that we’re all connected as human beings but we’re connected in the universal sense. We’re all made of the same stuff and we’re all living on this one planet. We should be part of nature but we don’t think like that at all, we’ve been convinced that we’re actually above it and it’s there as some sort of resource to be exploited. And it’s not a truth, it’s bullshit, and it’s something that is so cemented in our thought processes and institutions, but it’s wrong.

“Sometimes I think about that and it fills me with despair,” he signs off. “But sometimes I think, what a fucking exciting time to be alive when we’re finally realising this and we can make huge change happen.”

Lose Your Self is out now via SO Records. Enter Shikari will tour the UK this November.

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