UK band Enter Shikari has announced a monthly residency at a tiny venue in Bristol this year. The four-piece alternative rock group from Hertfordshire will perform three shows at SWX, a 1,800-capacity venue in the city centre, to promote the release of their seventh studio album.
Enter Shikari rose to fame after playing Download Festival in 2006 and with the release of its debut record Take to the Skies in 2007. They've since had countless successful tours across the world with loyal fanbases in the UK, Europe, Northern America and Asia. They're loved by their fans for their raucous on-stage presence and political statements as well as being considered the pioneers of the electronicore genre.
A Kiss For The Whole World will be their first studio album in three years set to be released on April 21 through SO Recordings and Ambush Reality. The band was inspired to write after they headlined the Download Festival Pilot in 2021 in front of 10,000 fans.
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Not a single new word flowed from the pen of the band's lead vocalist and keyboardist Rou Reynolds in the two years before the headline set, a realisation that helped define the band’s seventh LP. “I just didn’t realise that the human and physical connection to other people were so central to how I write,” he says. Enter Shikari isn’t just four people – it’s hundreds of thousands," the singer said.
Enter Shikari's new LP - which was recorded in an old farmhouse in Chichester - will consist of 12 tracks with ‘(pls) set me on fire’ set to be their first single release. The song conveys a time of frustration for the singer who had previously not gone longer than two weeks without writing music. He's described the first single as "a projectile vomit of positive energy" with every emotion trapped inside him for two years "finally set free".
Reynolds has previously teased a short seven-second clip of the song on Twitter earlier this week, which appeared to show a computer screen with the words “shikari2023” at the top. He wrote: “1,000,000 likes and I’ll leak it”. The band’s official Twitter page retweeted it, adding: “Let’s find out?”.
To mark the release of the new record, the band will play in five small venues in UK cities as part of its collection of residencies that are repeated in February, March and April 2023. The Bristol dates fall on February 19, March 18 and April 16.
Speaking on the spring 2023 tour, Reynolds added: "It’s hard to do anything interesting with live shows today. We wanted to do something different. We're going to become a local band to five major cities in the UK. It’s going to be interesting to see how the shows evolve every time we return.”
As expected, tickets are extremely limited to these shows. Exclusive pre-sale access begins on January 19 for members of the band's fan club and anyone who preorders the new album here. The general sale begins on January 26 through the band's website.
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