"I got used to playing one riff and then nothing for two minutes!"

The genresmashing sound of Enter Shikari requires a guitarist who always thinks outside the box

- By Ellie Rogers

On June 19, 2021, Enter Shikari headlined the Saturday night of Download’s 10,000-capacity Pilot Festival at Donington Park. After an excruciating 20-month battle with writer’s block, it was the catalytic event that reignited frontman and principal songwriter Rou Reynolds’ creative impulses, and which set the electrorock four-piece barrelling forth on a trajectory towards their ecstatic new album A Kiss For The Whole Word.

“The thrill of suddenly being able to write music again, which is something that’s been such a staple for me, made the music come out in quite an excited fashion,” says Rou, who seems perceptibly relieved and reinvigorated by having 12 new tracks to demonstrate his return to form. “It is all quite energised, a lot of it’s up-tempo and there’s a lot of positivity on this record because that’s naturally what I felt.”

Fittingly, the album’s title track opens with a literal fanfare of horns to herald the band’s triumph over creative adversity, before a deliciously overdriven guitar hook cuts in to really heat things up in typical Enter Shikari style. “The guitars are always quite central in developing a song and making it feel like it’s within the Shikari universe, because, obviously, the palette that we write with is rather broad,” explains Rou, who doesn’t typically play guitars in the band, but who does handle their production. Guitarist Rory Clewlow puts it this way: “With our electronics, we can go into so many different genres and so many different directions – but the guitar is the one sound that stays solid throughout.”