5 Questions With Enter Shikari's Rou Reynolds

Enter Shikari are always a blast when they hit the stage and when we caught up with the band at a recent show, we had the chance to chat with frontman Rou Reynolds. He expressed his enthusiasm about working on new material as well as topics he continually goes back to when writing. He also talked about his diverse influences when it comes to musical inspirations. Check out our full interview with Rou Reynolds of Enter Shikari below:

When performing onstage you have an explosive energy. Are you aware of the force you bring or is it more of a subconscious state of mind?

I always try to avoid cliché on this answer. It really is when you hear the music and you’re put in that environment, that’s the way you sort of react to it. I think because we’re on tour and we’re on very small cramped buses all the time so when you’re given all this large stage you’re sort of like, “Woohoo freedom!” [Laughs] I think it’s sort of the only way you keep fit and the music just takes hold.

When writing the previous album The Mindsweep, was there a topic or a theme that you found yourself going back to?

I guess just the simple concept of unity really. I know that’s such a wide term but that’s been the essential reason for our band’s existence. From day one, our first album, that was the main subject we touched on. In a world where there’s so much division still, class, race, sex, nationalism, creed, religion, there’s so many ways to divide people. I think music, for instance at a festival, people will come together indiscriminately just to celebrate being alive and that shared vulnerability we have when we listen to music. It’s such a beautiful thing and that’s the reason why we do it, music has been one thing that brought people together for like a millennia so we just continue to hold that torch I hope.

Is there any progression on new material or any new ideas floating around?

Yeah we just started doing some demoing. We’ve got a track that we recorded “Redshift” that we’re sort of holding onto. We’ll release it at some point this year. We’re not going to be in the studio until November for the next album because we’re touring up until then in Australia and Japan. Demoing has been really cool. It feels like it’s going to be quite different. Every album of ours is quite a big progression for us. We like to have lots of diverse influences. It’s quite exciting.

You have other musical projects -- one of them being the Shikari Soundsystem. What is the satisfaction that this brings to you that differs from Enter Shikari?

It’s definitely less – I don’t want to say effort but it’s a smaller, chilled entity because mainly it’s just us DJing and producing in front of laptops so it’s purely electronic. It’s kind of heavily influenced by – I hate to use the acronym EDM but it’s drum and bass dubstep, electronica, garage and a lot of underground UK music basically. We just have a bit of fun really.

Is there anything musically that you haven’t done yet that you would like to do?

We’re very sort of fidgety. We don’t like playing the same thing over and over again and releasing the same songs that are very similar, it can get dull very quickly. We’re constantly pushing ourselves, being influenced with different styles of music. We’re doing some stuff with some UK hip-hop artists soon which should be interesting. I used to play the trumpet. I used to be in orchestra at school and we still have all the brass in our music but I would love to do some orchestral stuff.

Our thanks to Rou Reynolds of Enter Shikari for the interview. Check out 'The Mindsweep' on iTunes.

Check Out Enter Shikari's Track "Redswift"

Filed Under: Enter Shikari