Ladies and gentlemen, Enter Shikari are back.
Their new album, Nothing is True & Everything is Possible, is a State of the Nation record for the digital age, and their last two singles – { The Dreamer’s Hotel } and The King – are almost certainly going to be flying high in our Songs Of The Year list.
So, naturally, in the midst of all of this chaos, we thought that we’d call up their frontman, producer, and primary songwriter, Rou Reynolds, to ramble on about keeping sane in the COVID-19 age, political ideologies, and the duty of artists to reflect modern society within their work; and, somehow, formulate a cohesive-enough piece of #journalism at the end of it.
Because some things, dear reader, will never change.
Your new album’s called Nothing is True & Everything is Possible. It seems hard to imagine that that’s been inspired by anything other than the events of the last few years.
‘I feel that, particularly over the last few years, it’s gotten very difficult for us to know what’s true. As individuals, we all have our own ideologies and things we believe to be right, and therefore we like to exaggerate to support our own causes. If we’re emotionally invested in things, too, it’s very easy for us to fall into arguments rather than actual discussions. Public discourse has become so difficult; we tend to speak at each other rather than with each other. So, that’s where the ‘Nothing is True’ aspect came from – it’s highlighting that the concept of truth has become so slippery, basically.
‘And then ‘Everything Is Possible’ just comes from us having seen shock after shock over the last five years. Politically and socially, there’s no sense of normality anymore. And, that’s only being brought more to light by what’s going on at the pandemic. There’s a real sense that nobody knows what’s possible anymore.
‘The word ‘possibility’ used to conjure up quite positive feelings. Even though ‘anything is possible’ is kind of a platitudinal thing – it’s not the weightiest of sentences – it now seems that there’s a lot more pessimism and a lot more fear around the concept of possibility. So, that was the concept of the album: to explore what’s possible for us musically and then to think about the future and what’s happened over the last few years.
Do you think there’s a quick fix to healing these sorts of societal rifts? Or might it take a generation?
‘It’s a persuasive way of thinking, isn’t it, to get everyone to revert ‘back to normality’? Things are constantly changing, so people are constantly trying to keep up with them – as soon as we get over this pandemic we’ll be back to catastrophic climate change, and there are constantly things that have the potential to be life-changing or social design-changing events and fears. It’s a very, very interesting time. I can’t help but to think back to, say, the early Noughties: we didn’t really think about it at the time, but those were amazing periods, and they feel so alien to the world we’re living in today.
‘There’s an argument to be made that things only seem so bad in the modern world because we’re hyper-exposed to them (via social media and the like) in a way that we never were before. Or, of course, it could just be that things are just getting worse.
‘I also think that a lot of the positive things are just being swept under the carpet nowadays. We all know that fear sells newspapers a lot better than positivity does. Steven Pinker talks a lot about this – how the long-term curve is upwards, and things are getting better, in terms of going right back outwards and thinking about the broader picture. We’re in a little dip at the moment, and there definitely is a sense of nationalism as a faux-normal way to think and way to make laws and statements. That, as an ideology, is back in a big way, and that is quite frightening. Then, when you put that on top of the things that we’re currently having to deal with – in terms of climate change, the pandemic, and whatever else – then I think you can safely say we’re in a bit of a downward dip, even if the long-term trend is towards a slightly better, healthier, and safer society.
Did the title of the album come once you looked back at the songs you’d recorded and notice an overarching theme? Or did you write the album with a title in mind?
‘I mean, I would love to be able to sit down and have a title at the very beginning of an album-writing process. That would be heaven, but that’s never happened. I find that I must start writing first, and then a theme or a narrative will naturally rear its head. I find that’s the best way, really – if we were to limit ourselves by trying to write something within a predetermined space then that would be detrimental to the music, even if it would make things easier. So, no, the album title is literally the last thing to be done. It comes once we’ve made this body of work and we’re able to sit back and look at it with perspective.
Do you think it’s the duty of musicians of a certain profile to comment upon – and document – times of social unease? Or should that be down to the discretion of the individual?
‘I mean, this is the age-old question, isn’t it? Whether music should be political or whether it should be escapism. I mean, for me personally, it’s quite natural to make art that’s also of social commentary. I grew up in a hardcore punk scene, and it’s completely second-nature that when you’re running around screaming your head off, it’s got to be about the things that you are very passionate about; and, once one loses the ego of the teens and singing about personal woes and romantic strife – it becomes the society, and it becomes your community. Those are the things that anger you, and they’re the things that you want to change; music unites people in that way.
‘So, that all comes naturally to me. But I’d never want to say that that’s what musicians should do. It’s a big world – there’s space for everything. There’s space for music that puts forward different ideas, and there’s space for some music that doesn’t put forward any ideas: I think we all enjoy and appreciate escapism from time to time. So, it’s just whatever you feel comfortable with.
‘The thing is, if I was to take the more stringent view of ‘artists should be using their pedestal’, what would happen? We could be inundated with really shit, banal, obvious, political sloganeering. If a lot of musicians were suddenly being forced into this world then a lot of what would come out would obviously be drivel. The old sense of ‘only writing about what you know’ should trump any pressure that we might otherwise put on people to write about things that they, perhaps, don’t know about.
The notion of there being a ‘songwriter laureate’ – akin to our Poet Laureate – is one that’s always intrigued me.
I think that with anybody who works in the arts, one of the greatest gifts that they can be given is time. I have time on my hands to think about subjects and make artistic creations around these subjects, which means that I perhaps gain more perspective than somebody who’s working a job where they have to go to a factory or an office every day. We’re also caught up in just getting by ourselves; looking after our families and making sure that we have money coming in to support the people we love. That takes up enough time as it is, so people often don’t have time to think about the wider perspective, or the bigger picture – ‘Big History’, as it’s sometimes called.
‘So, I suppose I see it as a bit of a duty to at least use that time to make sure that I’m writing things that are going to offer people interesting perspectives that are hopefully going to benefit them. I think that’s why art can be quite trustworthy – often, it comes from people who get to travel a lot and get to experience the realisation that we’re pretty much the same all over the globe. We all want the same things, and subsistence, and support, so to be able to put ideas forward in music and in art is something that I find quite important.
You put out a lyric compendium and called it Dear Future Historians: was this solely intended as a retrospective of the band or was there a part of you that thought it summed up a particular period of your own life or the world at large?
Yeah. I think, especially once you put it all together, it does become a story. In effect, when you stretch back far enough, we’ve been singing about the same things forever, and we probably will continue to do so forever. Again, it’s a case of perspective, but I think that that’s the main thing that we’re trying to offer with this album; the fact that, when we’re all so hyper-focused on the mundane details of day-to-day life, it’s easy for us to forget that we are one species, living on one planet and that we’ve got one chance at this.
‘It also serves to boost people’s imaginations; for, we do live in a society that does quite a lot to dampen people’s imaginations. Considering the way that technology and social media affect the hippocampus and other parts of the brain that affect our creativity, I think it’s pivotal that we try and boost imagination and community, especially in a world that’s become more and more divisive and polarised.
Do the theme and content of your lyrics inform the music you’re writing?
‘The music dictates the lyrical content, really. Or, at least, the emotional content. For me, the music always comes first: there’ll be some sort of musical idea that’ll make me feel something, and then there’ll be a guide there that informs me what the lyrics should be about or what point we should try to get across. So, the music dictates that process.
‘If each album has a particular sound, I guess that’s just down to the things I’ve been listening to and how bold we’re able to be at that time. I think, with every record, we gain a little more confidence, and thus we’re able to stretch out a little further. Of course, I think that this album is probably the furthest we’ve been stretched, but I suppose that’s down to the amount of freedom we had when we were going in to make this album.
What were you listening to when you were making Nothing is True & Everything is Possible, then?
I know this is a fake answer, but once I’m in the studio I don’t listen to anything else. It’s odd. I’m not the kind of songwriter or producer that’s constantly referencing other music. That seems to be quite a regular thing now; I did a bit of pop writing last year for various other people, and that pop world is very much ‘today we’re going to make a song that has a beat like this song, a melody like this song…’, and you constantly find yourself referencing other stuff. Whereas I try to be a bit more individual and less defined with my writing; I try to keep all the doors open at all points. I think that’s important.
And, finally: how are you feeling about the state of the world at this precise moment in time?
‘I think I’m probably feeling the same as everyone else. A sense of fear, a sense of confusion, a sense of anger at the lack of preparation. I don’t suppose we’re anywhere near as bad as the Americans in terms of our preparation; I heard last week that, two years ago, Trump disbanded their pandemic preparatory board to save money. We’ve seen similar things before because we’ve seen the Tories destroying the NHS and cutting funding; we’ve got almost the lowest amount of ICU beds in Europe, which is mad.
‘Considering that we’re in a moment of hyper-patriotism off the back of Brexit – ‘We’re British! We rule the world!’ and all of those messages – then it just seems obscene that we’ve got more intensive care beds than Italy, or Spain, or other places that are going through absolute hell. So, I’m worried, I’m anxious, and I’m trying to think about anything that we can do at this time. Taking each day as it comes, just like everybody else.