Serendipitous Flow

The summer has run its course in Ol' Blightly once again. Some things the country experienced were different this year – they're never having a Jubilee/Olympics double ever again – however, some events remained the same. One of those was the Reading and Leeds Festival, something of a rite of passage for any British music lover and two of the most iconic stages in the world. But even with all the massive names filling the bill – Foo Fighters, The Black Keys, At The Drive-In, Kasabian – one band stood head and shoulders above all for punters when votes were cast for performance of the weekend.

Finishing off a bowl of strawberries and cream with his girlfriend (seriously), Enter Shikari leader Rou Reynolds humbly admits that the band was blown away when they heard the news. “Every year that we play Reading and Leeds the crowd is just awesome,” he gushes. “It's one of our favourite festivals to play, definitely, and to get voted best band was quite surreal. On any stage of that size we try and naturally fill up the space and progress sonically, but we don't think about it too consciously to be honest; you go out there after you've been couped up in a van for a few hours and it's just like a playground.”

Formed in 2003, old friends Reynolds, Rory Clewlow (guitar), Chris Batten (bass) and Rob Rolfe (drums) generated a wave of underground hype with a number of demo EPs before debut album, Take To The Skies, officially released in 2007, solidified their standing as one of the most explosive and popular British bands doing the circuit. Released at the start of this year, their third record, A Flash Flood Of Colour, builds further on this reputation, the album amalgamating hardcore ideals with dubstep and drum'n'bass breakdowns in a sound that is unlike any other. According to Reynolds, crowds have been eating it up. “This has definitely seemed like the most immediate album in a live sense; people have really taken to the tracks and they go down really well live and people are screaming the lyrics back louder than ever. We're really enjoying it.”

Although sessions for the record began in London last year, the band ended up decamping to Karma Sound Studios in Thailand for three weeks to complete the work, enticed by the opportunity to work in premium facilities surrounded by exotic beauty. Considering the energy and raw aggression found in most of the tracks, the location seems somewhat contradictory. However, Reynolds couldn't imagine the results coming from anywhere else. “I certainly think getting away from it all helps, definitely. Getting away from the hustle and bustle of cities calms your mind and enables you to really concentrate and feel the music and it just works for us. I think if we had stayed in London and did the whole album there I don't think it would have been as good.

“The producer we were working with, Dan Weller, he did guitar production on [2009 album] Common Dreads. He's just a great friend of ours and we get on really well, so we decided to go with him fully for this album and he had a friend who was building this studio out there. He'd finished it, it had all gone to plan and he'd had a few Thai bands and Asian bands there, but he was trying to attract a few more Western bands over and get his name out. So he offered us a proposition that we couldn't refuse basically. We were in the middle of nowhere, so we had some inspirational walks around, but it was literally just jungle with this state-of-the-art studio in the middle of it. All we had nearby was a little fishing village that was completely untouched by Western influence, so that was amazing, to see how the locals lived.

“And the great thing about it was there were just no distractions whatsoever. They even had cooks and stuff so we had meals made for us – this incredible traditional Thai cooking – so literally all we had to worry about was getting the music down. We had a room each, like basically a small hotel room each at the studio as well, which made all the difference because when we were in London we were commuting back and forwards on the Tube each day, an hour each way every day, which is not ideal to get you inspired,” he laughs. “So there was this really calm and relaxing atmosphere where the mind could be at its most creative.”

Arguably, A Flash Flood Of Colour is Enter Shikari's most consistent and flowing release, with the whole album seeming unified sonically and thematically, which is ironic considering the songwriting process Reynolds speaks of.

“In terms of the structure of the album we didn't think too hard about it. We had all these individual songs and for the first time we didn't think about how the album would flow actually, we just concentrated on each song as its own entity,” he admits. “And I guess it's just through serendipity that it actually flows really well. We mulled over the order of the tracks quite a lot and tried out different things and thought about the outros of tracks going into the intros of others, but we were committed to keeping the tracks separate and not doing any little interludes or anything this time and it's worked well.”

And as far as band progression goes, that harmony is what Reynolds considers to be the biggest area of growth for the quartet. “I think probably the main thing for me was how whole we sound as a band [now]. It's very much one unit. The lines between what is guitar and what is electronic and what is bass, it all got blurred. We're really getting into bleeding the electronics either through the guitar or vice versa. The base rig is becoming ridiculously vast now, a lot of instruments run of Ableton and my laptop so yeah, it's all becoming one sound and we're not really thinking about different parts, we're just sitting down and saying, 'What does this need? Does it need something tranquil and light, or does it need a sharp sound?' We're looking at all the instrumentation we've got at our fingertips instead of thinking in a traditional band sense.”

Enter Shikari are genre smashers – plain and simple. Their sound walks a line between the dancefloor and the mosh pit and on their second visit to our shores in seven months, having made an appearance at Soundwave earlier this year, Reynolds is eager to deliver the meld those two worlds create and deliver the full experience to rabid Aussie fans. “Soundwave was great fun and the crowds were awesome – the vibe was great for us – but being able to play a much longer set with a full structure of all the new songs, we're really looking forward to it.”

Enter Shikari will be playing the following shows:

Thursday 20 September - Eatons Hill, Brisbane QLD
Friday 21 September - UNSW Roundhouse, Sydney NSW
Saturday 22 September - Billboard, Melbourne VIC
Sunday 23 September - Billboard, Melbourne VIC