Forget the arenas. Last night, Enter Shikari belonged to two hundred people in a Walthamstow taproom…
Words & photos by Felix Bartlett (@bartlettfelixhc) | April 26, 2026
As the sun sets over Blackhorse Road, the air is filled with friends, families and a belter of a playlist blasting out some of the biggest bangers in the alt scene. it’s te kind of April evening that makes East London look like it was designed for the occasion: golden light catching the brewery’s chimney stacks, the Walthamstow Wetlands glowing somewhere behind the rooftops, people spilling out of Signature Brew with pints, squinting into the last of it. For a show about human connection and the state of the world, the setting is almost too on the nose.
As the sun sets and the crowd pours inside the venue, you can feel the excitement brewing.
Before any of that though, Native James comes crashing in to blow the roof off the place. The Ipswich-born alternative-rap artist has spent years carving out a landscape entirely his own, fusing hip-hop, grime, punk, rock and metal into something that genuinely shouldn’t work as neatly as it does. Tonight he’s the main support at an intimate album launch show; in six weeks he’ll be at Download Festival. Watching him fill this room, you get the sense Donington Park won’t know what’s hit it. Brilliant, exciting, and very much one to watch.
This is the final night of three: Liverpool’s Cavern on Thursday, Kingston’s Fighting Cocks on Friday, and now here a victory lap through venues a fraction of the size they’ll be headlining come November. You can’t help but smile at the audacity of it. A band capable of coming to conquer two nights at Alexandra Palace, choosing to play rooms where the Shikari crew are basically in the crowd. Rou grins at the front row like he’s been handed a gift.
As the smoke bellows and the light dims Rou raises his arms are the intro to LOSE YOUR SELF bellows throughout the brewery. That eerie ambient intro the one that sounds like the world buffering gives way to a detonation and the room absolutely pops off! The entire room singing these fresh lyrcis in unison. But here’s the thing about tonight’s setlist: it could have been wall-to-wall Lose Your Self and nobody would have complained. It’s two weeks old and it’s evident this crowd knows the album word for word. Instead, Shikari do something much more generous.
Thirteen songs: one new album track in the opener, one in The Flick of a Switch I., one in Find Out the Hard Way, and one in It’s OK. The rest is an expansive dive through the catalogue that feels less like a setlist and more like a care package for us die-hards, featuring Labyrinth, (pls) set me on fire., Undercover Agents, and Rabble Rouser, with The Dreamer’s Hotel as a closer; the kind of night people will be talking about for ages. These aren’t the obvious choices, and one thing you can always count on with Shikari is to expect the unexpected, each night of the tour offering a completely unique setlist; for me, this one took the biscuit, and hearing Quelle Surprise (plus remix) absolutely detonate the end of the show was something else.
This is, it’s worth saying, a stripped-back show in every sense. You’re basically on the stage for half of it, prompting Chris to remark, “if you’re going to crowdsurf, try and drop off just before the stage!” There’s no elaborate production, no guest spots. The Void Stares Back is here, delivered raw, without the orchestral swell it typically carries. On paper, that should feel like something’s missing; in practice, it doesn’t matter even slightly. The weight and sound of this band in a room this size more than makes up for it, and if anything, stripping everything back just makes the songs hit closer to the bone.
There’s a thesis running through Lose Your Self that we’re all becoming more isolated, more atomised, more mediated by screens and algorithms, and here’s the funny thing: in a room this size, with songs this good, it becomes completely impossible to feel any of that. The two hundred people who turned up are very deliberately refusing to be disconnected from each other or the band, and Shikari have given us that opportunity.
“Grassroots venues are one of the only things remaining that allow for that effortless community,” Rou has said recently, in the way that Rou says most things: earnest, slightly philosophical, completely correct. Tonight is the proof. Anyone in this room came in a stranger to most people around them and leaves feeling like they just shared something. That’s not a small thing.
If you haven’t been into Lose Your Self yet, our review is up on Amped Magazine now and it’ll get you where you need to be. The short version: it’s their darkest, most urgent album, and it hits exponentially harder live. Which, if last night was anything to go by, is a terrifying prospect for those arena crowds come November.
Enter Shikari are somehow only getting started.
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