Enter Shikari released their highly-anticipated new album A Kiss for the Whole World last Friday.
The band's most vibrant, direct and life-affirming album so far, A Kiss for the Whole World was created in the idyllic surroundings of Chichester in West Sussex. With a delipidated farmhouse serving as a studio, the band successfully captured a sense of renewed momentum on record.
That momentum was born of the live environment, with their show at Download Festival Pilot unlocking a block in frontman Rou Reynolds's creativity, with Reynolds coming to the realisation that people were intrinsic to his capacity to write, the band looked to conjure that magic by making a record off-grid and in the company of their favourite people. With no outside producers or distractions from a hustling city outside, the band conjured their next sonic evolution, living a myriad of new, wholesome experiences in the process.
To celebrate the arrival of A Kiss For The Whole World, we spoke with Rou Reynolds who shared with us the five most wholesome stories from the creation of A Kiss For The Whole World
Five Wholesome Stories Of Recording 'A Kiss For The Whole World'
The record was literally powered by sunshine
"The obvious one is that the album was recorded with solar power, so it's a solar-powered album which was something we really wanted. It wasn't like a stipulation. It wasn't like it had to be, but like if we can find, you know, a way of recording the music completely renewably then we would be really happy. And I think psychologically as well, it sort of made us feel more at ease. We could spend loads of time and it's not like at the back of our mind we'd be thinking, using up a lot of energy here for, for a band that's supposedly trying to save the world, you know? Whereas yeah, the fact that it was also the power, it was like, well we can do this for as long as the sun's out."
"That took the pressure off. It was the barn area of the house which was a really dilapidated old barn. I don’t how long it's going to be standing there. It had ivy and a tree sort of growing pretty much inside it. The ivy was all over the inside walls. It was beautiful. It was like you know, one of those places you see urban explorers breaking into to see, cuz no one's been there for hundred years or whatever. But yeah, on top of that roof was, were quite a lot of soda panels. So we, yeah, we were lucky that we were able to power the whole thing."
The studio was completely off-grid
"The house was also completely off-grid but it had no central heating. So the only way to warm this place up in late February and March in the UK was to use these wood burners. So every morning we were so that they had like some land and, and, and some woods and, and, and a regenerator of the forest, which was awesome. And we were chopping wood every morning. And some of us pulled our weight more than others."
"A lot of us actually found it quite sort of fun and quite wholesome. I love having this kind of morning routine. You get up and you go straight outside to chop some wood to get the fire lit. It felt so rustic and wholesome. It’s nice to do really kind of almost like menial tasks, it’s interesting how I had quite a lot of ideas whilst I was chopping wood. That was so weird. But I was like inspirational by that. I think it quietens the mind when you're just concentrating on a kind of simple physical task. And it sort of enables you to sort of make links to various things that you've been thinking about. And yeah. So that was cool."
"Some days were really cold. There are a couple of days where that went down to sort of like five degrees. Even the days that were sunny weren't that warm. I think it went up to like maybe 15, 15, 16 in 1 day. But the majority was fine. A lot of us were in like onesies or dressing gowns a lot of the time, like layers, you know. Yeah, it was good."
The record was completely self-produced
"It was the first album where we had no assistant producers, no in-house engineers, and no extra help whatsoever. It, it's really a hundred per cent DIY so the only person other than the band involved was our engineer George who's been with us now for well he did, nothing is true with us as, as one of the engineers we had."
"So we basically just kidnapped him and all his equipment and all our equipment and set up our own temporary studio. There was no sense of going through the motions, you know, like going to a state-of-the-art studio or something where they have their way of doing things and you just sort of fit into their lane if you like. It was completely different. It was setting up everything how we wanted to be set up or experimenting with different ways of recording things and using different mics and everything. It took me right back to recording EPs in Chris's garage. Like as teenagers where we were begging, stealing, and borrowing any equipment we could find to make our early rough-sounding EPs."
It was made by the ocean
"We were quite near the coast. It was still a little bit of a drive. We went down to the coast once, once a week. We were there for like five, six weeks. We went down once a week to do some early morning swimming. We’d have a run first, a group run which is very wholesome. Sort of along the Harborside and beach sort of near Chichester. And then we'd have a swim and obviously, again the sea at that time of year is bloody freezing. Rory's well into his swimming at the moment so we were doing a lot of breathing and trying to stay in the water for a long time and keep our breath, you know, a reasonable pace and all that kind of thing, which was really fun and nice."
A woodpecker features in the finale
"The end of the song Kiss For The Whole World x, where it's just me and Rory, well that was recorded live and together. So that wasn't to a click track or to a grid or anything. It was just me and Rory jamming basically. And we set up mics so I was singing into the mic obviously. Then Rory had a room mic for the guitar, so it's this really lovely guitar tone. But then we also had the door wide open and we had a mic in the doorway out for outside and all the nature that you can hear in the background was recorded again live at the same time. There was a take that I thought I sang better on, but we ended up not using that take because we used the take where you can hear a Woodpecker, you can hear a woodpecker hammering in the background. And we were like, oh, we have to use that take. I mean, we could have taken the nature audio from that one. Like if there wasn't too much bleeding from the guitar. May maybe you might have heard the guitar through that mic. I don’t know, but we were like, no, we want it, we want it to be pure and what actually happened in that moment. So that was really cool when we played it back and we heard the woodpecker."
A Kiss For The Whole World is out now.
Listen to A Kiss For The Whole World
>
