Credit: myspace.com/peterhill

Enter Shikari are standing on the edge of history. As record labels umm and ahh over what to do over YouTube, illegal downloads and set about suing MySpace for the amount of free advertising their bands are getting at the hands of songs being uploaded illegally, they’re missing the trick as St Albans’ Enter Shikari take the lead in circumnavigating label culture altogether. Music Towers caught up with frontman Rou Reynolds in the latter stages of the UK tour to try to find out how they’re gonna kickstart a revolution.

“I think it was the right progression for us. The way we’ve done everything so far was so DIY, setting up stuff ourselves to keep the most control, make sure we take the path we want to take. We’ve been talking to a lot of labels recently – they’ve been offering us what seems like great deals but we’ve seen some of our favourite bands been dropped after a single or an album hasn’t sold millions, and we just thought it wasn’t worth it. With Vital Distribution, which who we’re probably going to go with, they’re just really keen to keep this whole DIY ethic going on with us in direct control of as much stuff as possible. It feels…healthy, I guess.”

While Enter Shikari’s mix of electronic, high-energy trance-esque synths and the raw-throat post-hardcore roar is enough to set them apart from the rest of their Brit-emo peers, it is this DIY approach that has got the eyes of the industry and the ears of the public focussed on them.

“Vital are saying that if this works it could be quite a milestone in the music industry. It’s looking that as time goes on, record labels are gonna be less and less important, and the bands’ are gonna have much more deciding power, that’s the way it should be.”

At the moment the band have put out their music under their own “label”, Ambush Reality.

“The decision to make a name went on for literally months. Then we just realised that everyone was just set in their ways, of having labels and that’s how it’s supposed to work in reality. But we were ‘hold on, if [not signing to a label] works it’ll be a whole new way of doing things’. It’s ambushing the reality of the industry”