Source: Matt Higgs
As you may well have heard, there’s going to be a new Enter Shikari album this year. It’s titled The Spark and it is to be released on September 22nd.
Enter Shikari have always been a band for subverting expectations. Let’s not forget that after they released The Mindsweep in 2015, they wasted no time in releasing another single that wasn’t part of an album called ‘Redshift‘.
It’s a pretty nice song, there’s no denying that most of The Mindsweep and ‘Redshift‘ focus a lot on electronics, grand orchestral arrangements and multi-layered vocal harmonies – but then the next thing that we heard from them was ‘Hoodwinker‘, which if you don’t remember was pretty heavy. It sounded a bit like this…
Pretty heavy right? As much as ‘Redshift‘ is a much more pop-oriented tune, with nice clean singing and dance-y synth lines, ‘Hoodwinker‘ starts with a breakdown that sounds like Architects. Mind you, this has always been the duality of Enter Shikari. The boys have always managed to straddle the line between being a dance band and being a hardcore band, which is why they’re such a legendary band in our scene and can play Slam Dunk and Download, but can also sell out Alexandra Palace and be played on daytime Radio 1.
After ‘Hoodwinker‘ there was a bit of a break in terms of releases for Enter Shikari. As well as a busy international touring schedule, it now turns out they were writing and recording a new album. Fast-forward to June of this year, and they subverted expectations again by not just dropping a new single seemingly out of nowhere, but also collaborating with grime artist Big Narstie on ‘Supercharge‘.
Again, something a bit different from what we were expecting after ‘Hoodwinker‘. Of course, cos people on the internet can’t be trusted with anything, when ‘Hoodwinker‘ came out we had a lot of:
Source: YouTube
And then with ‘Supercharge‘ people really didn’t seem to like the fact that a band that have had rapping on their songs in the past (see: ‘Anaesthetist‘, ‘Sssnakepit‘) dared to have an actual rapper in a new song:
Source: YouTube
Sigh.
Anyway, it now turns out that none of the songs we’ve mentioned above are actually going to be on The Spark. However, we do now have a taster of an actual song off the album, the extremely poppy ‘Live Outside‘.
Even this is a stark contrast to the more aggressive, more low-slung aggressive swagger of ‘Supercharge‘.
So what can we expect from a new Enter Shikari album? We can expect to have all our expectations thrown out the window. After all this band put ‘The Bank Of England‘ and ‘There’s A Price On Your Head‘ on the same album. Let’s just wait and see what we are given instead of trying to second-guess them, eh guys?
