The Shikari crew stare down the end of the world and somehow make it feel worth showing up for on Enter Shikari’s surprise eighth album…

Words by Felix Bartlett | April 10, 2026

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Given the quantity of unwelcome surprises the world has thrown at us lately, waking up to a brand new Enter Shikari record with zero warning is exactly the kind of news worth getting out of bed for. No singles, no rollout, no PR campaign. Just twelve tracks of Rou Reynolds staring down the barrel of civilisational collapse and asking, politely but firmly, what the actual hell is going on.

Lose Your Self feels like an amalgamation of everything the band have built across their catalogue, dragged into 2026 and roughed up a bit. It’s heavier in spirit than recent outings, more urgent, and in places more experimental, with electronic elements woven through the record that bring to mind modern metalcore’s more ambitious corners without ever fully sitting in that world.

Opener Lose Your Self sets the tone immediately, with Reynolds dissecting the myth of radical individualism over a riff that has no business being as epic as it is. Shipwrecked is the standout, a brutal and beautifully structured track that wrestles with inherited narratives about human nature and whether we were ever given a fair story to begin with. Needless to say there are plenty of breakdowns throughout but here it truly takes the biscuit and is undoubtedly going to be one of their biggest tracks for the next touring cycle.

Where previous records have leaned into defiance or clear-eyed hope, Lose Your Self often feels like a band reckoning with the possibility that the optimistic ending might not be coming. Reynolds isn’t nihilistic about it, he’s too smart and too emotionally tuned in for that, but the hope here feels hard-won rather than given, a pipe dream acknowledged as such rather than dressed up as certainty. In 2026, that’s somehow more comforting than the alternative.

The closing Spaceship Earth trilogy ties it together, pulling back to the widest possible lens and finding, just barely, a reason to keep going. It’s the exhale the record needed.

A surprise release with physical copies available on day one is still a ballsy move, but feels entirely on brand for a band already knee-deep in an intimate record store run and gearing up for Alexandra Palace. Nobody does it quite like Shikari and I for one can’t wait to see what surprises they have in store for us yet…

Verdict: 💀💀💀💀

For fans of: The Prodigy, Bring Me The Horizon, Pendulum

Lose Your Self is out now via So.