We’ll spare you the details and the retreading of recent waters, but Enter Shikari’s debut album, Take To The Skies, was released on March 19th, 2007. It remains an important merging of post-hardcore and electronic soundscapes. In 2007, the world wasn’t really quite ready for a band like Enter Shikari. At the time, you probably couldn’t name bands that merged the throat shredding styles of post-hardcore/metalcore with the flip side of that, techno/electronic/drum and bass influences. They weren’t necessarily the first band to combine the two, as bands like Godflesh, Nine Inch Nails, and others had done this before, albeit more in the industrial realm of things. Enter Shikari was, in essence, one of the bands that started and popularized what’s known as “electronicore”.
Released on their own Ambush Reality label, the band’s DIY spirit was apparent from the jump. And Take To The Skies is anything but one-dimensional, with a wide net of styles and tempos being cast upon the ears of listeners. Keeping in mind that quite a few of the songs on the record dated back all the way to around 2003-2004, and you can get a feel for the fact that Enter Shikari were trying to identify and hone in their sound. Yet, almost every song on the record has a trait that makes it stand out. Whether it’s the constant left-field turns of “Return To Energiser”, the memorable breakdown on the iconic “Mothership”, or the meme-worthy clapping on fan favorite “Sorry, You’re Not A Winner”, Take To The Skies isn’t an album that gets stuck in neutral very often.
Midway through the album, the track “Return To Energiser” starts off fast and furious, but then throws in a random synth break that the listener never sees coming. That experimental shift is prevalent throughout Take To The Skies, where electronics and post-hardcore are combined in a way that really hadn’t been done before. Standout single “Mothership” opens with a pulsing synth break, then shifts into a raucous refrain of “Go tell all your friends, that this is the end”. It’s this combination of elements that makes the music perfect for either the moshpit or a club. What makes the album so successful and influential is that it takes the fairly standard post-hardcore sound of the mid 2000s, but twists around in ways that are both extremely conducive to moshing (Return To Energiser, Sorry You’re Not A Winner, Ok Time For Plan B), and that would fit in well at a rave (Mothership). These songs feel timeless and not thrown together like so many other bands that followed. Ignore the obvious strain that comes with such aggressive vocals, though – the energy levels are always high throughout, and it even has a slow ballad near the end of the album in “Adieu”. And the drumming? Wild, especially on tracks like “Ok Time For Plan B”, which combines all the elements that make Enter Shikari great into one song. Seriously, the buildup here is just perfect.
A lot of modern electronicore comes off as gimmicky, especially some of the albums that followed in TTTS’s footsteps. Ignore the stigma of those, because bands like I See Stars are absolutely indebted to Enter Shikari’s influence. Even though Enter Shikari has clearly expanded on their foundation in recent albums (2014’s The Mindsweep, especially), and their melodies might be brighter now (2013 single “Radiate”), the band’s debut will always be a much-loved album in music history. So many of today’s modern bands draw upon it (and ES’s body of work in general) that Take To The Skies is one of the more influential albums of the last 17+ years. If you’ve never listened to it before, now is the time.
