Enter Shikari – A Kiss for the Whole World

Many people wondered if they would ever hear from Enter Shikari again. They sort of slipped off after a tough pandemic and an attempt to rejuvenate a live performance agenda. The band themselves thought they’d come to the end of their collaborative road together, their creativity petering out with their momentum. So it was exciting news when A Kiss for the Whole World was announced – a record scraped together by a group tentatively kickstarting operations once more in early 2022. The quartet claim to have recorded the album using solar power alone, fuelling begged and borrowed equipment in a dilapidated farmhouse in Chichester. 

This record is striking. It sounds unmistakably like the pouring forth of a lot of pent-up stuff: angst, relief, elation. It is also chaos. Bits of any and all genres are cobbled together into a patchwork of sound that lurches about all over the place. A rap passage gives way to a serene classical sound, which attempts to lay the foundation for a metal uprising. It’s hard work for the listener.

There is something to be said for abandoning the strophic verse-chorus format that any artist who hopes to scale the charts clings to. These songs are linear outpourings of emotion, and the album’s openers, A Kiss for the Whole World and (Pls) Set Me on Fire, make for a particularly overwraught start. Deadwood and Jailbreak – tucked away in the middle of the tracklist – are highlights. They have a sensibility to them that the rest of the album lacks, properly formulated to convey the sentiments that the band are desperate to throw out into the world.

On the whole, A Kiss for the Whole World is far from being easy listening. There is so much packed into every track and it’s wholly unsettled, jumping about frantically from passage to passage. It’s a joy to hear the band’s thrill to be back in action, but Enter Shikari have slightly overdone it here. 

Will Snell

A Kiss for the Whole World is released on 21^st April 2023. For further information or to order the album visit Enter Shikari’s website here.

Watch the video for the single (Pls) Set Me on Fire here: