Courtesy: Jennifer McCord

In their native England, where all five of its albums over 15 years debuted within the Top 20 on the U.K. chart, genre-morphing post-rock, punk and emo band Enter Shikari has graduated to headlining arenas. On tour in the U.S. this month, in support of 2017’s The Spark, the band from the north of London will be playing rooms much smaller, perhaps none as small as Slim’s in San Francisco, which will host Enter Shikari during Noise Pop next week.

“When things were getting big for us in Europe and elsewhere, it sort of frustrated me that America wasn’t following in the same sort of ascension,” frontman Roughton “Rou” Reynolds conceded in a call from the road. “But I’ve actually grown to love it, because it’s really the only place now in the world that we get to play these kind of really intimate venues again and feel the kind of punk rock spirit that we felt back in Europe for so many years.

“Usually I find, after a while, you just want the other thing. So if we’ve been doing an arena tour, then I’ll be thirsty to sort of get back into a sweaty, grimy venue again. And then vice versa. … I just feel really lucky that we get to have both of those awesome experiences.”

The band members have played together since 1999, when they were in their early teens. Since 2003, Reynolds (whose first name rhymes with “wow”) and his bandmates, bassist Chris Batten, drummer Rob Rolfe and guitarist Liam “Rory” Clewlow, have been blending hardcore rock and punk with electronica, rap, metalcore, drum and bass and dubstep. The band members have cited everyone from At the Drive-In to Rage Against the Machine, the Beatles, Igor Stravinsky and the Prodigy as influences.

But The Spark also has a heavy dollop of melody and a bit less screaming, making for Enter Shikari’s most accessible album. To Reynolds and the others, that unique combination of styles—sometimes all within the same song—didn’t seem out of place.

His earliest influences were Motown and soul, which he picked up from his father, a DJ. From his “nan,” he learned jazz and big band. “And then my uncle introduced me to, like, The Prodigy,” he said. “That was a ‘whoa’ moment. As he was discovering dance, electronica, hardcore punk, and, yes, classical music, Clewlow brought in his own influences of drum and bass and jungle.

Where other artists might cut elements of their sound to fit a more accepted mold, Enter Shikari, tossed it all in the blender. Part of that had to do with needing something to stand out amid the talented London punk scene. But the band didn’t feel the need to fit in, regardless.

“It wasn’t even that long ago that … if you grew up listening to metal, you were a metalhead and everything else was shit. And then if you grew up listening to dance music, you were a raver and God forbid you’d be listening to rock music,” Reynolds said. “Having my upbringing, I kind of thought that that was such a silly way to live. It’s like eating one dessert for the whole of your life; just only eating chocolate cake when there’s a thousand other amazing desserts out there.”

As a songwriter, Reynolds has frequently leaned toward big political issues: Climate change, inequality, healthcare in the U.K. and more. To a lesser degree, he does so on The Spark does as well. Punk anthem “Take My Country Back” is a reaction to the passage of Brexit, election of Donald Trump and the threat of creeping nationalism.

“I think of it as quite a cowardly kind of headspace to be in,” Reynolds said of nationalism. “Because it’s this retreating back, behind your borders, and pointing outwards, calling everyone an ‘other.’ … It’s a very sort of suspicious, inhumane way of thinking. And we’re seeing that throughout not just in the U.K., and in America, but throughout Europe. Throughout Eastern Europe there’s the rise of the far right. … If you spoke to anyone 10 years ago, nationalism was just this thing that you laughed at. It was not a very rational way to view the world. It’s just kind of reared its head again.”

But The Spark also contains Reynolds’ most personal writing. During the period between albums, during which Enter Shikari’s profile grew rapidly, Reynolds’ lifelong mental health struggles—anxiety and depression—grew stronger. The day following an award show in 2015, a panic attack grew into something worse, requiring a brief hospitalization. The time was also marked by the end of a long-term relationship and the death of two grandparents.

The synth-led power pop track “Live Outside” tackles the mental health issues head-on. The song, like many others by the band, aims to instill hope and hammer home the realization that no one is truly alone. At the same time, people who believe they have no mental health issues of their own are likely missing their own idiosyncrasies.

“For me, that was a huge thing growing up,” he said. “I was thinking I was just a bit weird, and it’s just stuff that I had to get on with. I would have appreciated it if someone would have spoken about these things. … The awareness is so much better than it was when I was at school, and the stigma is being broken down more every day. So it’s far, far better. I’m just trying to do my little bit to hopefully persuade people that these are things that we all go through and we can share these vulnerabilities. That’s how we help each other, and how we grow.”

Reynolds wrote “The Sights” about new beginnings. After the conclusion of a relationship that lasted the better part of seven years, he was single for the first time, feeling afraid of not being with someone, and searching for a sense of self that wasn’t attached to another person. “I’m unqualified,” he sings of learning to function without a partner and searching for love anew. Although it was a difficult place to arrive at, he’s now happily single, he said.

And on the nearly five-minute-long “Airfield,” which begins as a sparse falsetto and piano ballad before climaxing in a symphony of noise, Reynolds rounds up his and his friends’ experiences to deliver a message of perseverance through difficult times.

“It shouldn’t be confused with ‘everything happens for a reason,’” he said. “Hopefully, it doesn’t come across like I’m speaking down to people. Like, ‘I’ve been through all this, so you can as well.’ I hate that kind of forced positivity. So hopefully it’s just kind of realistic, more sober. ‘Even if you’re going through hell right now, if you can get through it, there’ll probably be some positives at the end of it.’”

With the songs written, Enter Shikari went hunting for a producer and found David Kosten, the man responsible for mining gold from the likes of Bat for Lashes, Guillemots, Marina and the Diamonds, Brooke Fraser and Everything Everything, another genre-bending band. “I wanted to co-produce it with someone … [who] would help us in this slight broadening of our sound,” Reynolds said. “It just clicked immediately with him.”

It was never a goal to make the record accessible to pop music fans, Reynolds said, though he acknowledges that his desire to add more melody could have that effect. He dug into the songbook of David Bowie as inspiration.

“I think [Bowie’s death] spurred me into wanting melody to take the focus, and have the songs not go off in 50 directions, which is usually what Enter Shikari tracks do,” he said. “They’re quite sort of ridiculous beasts. There was definitely a different [writing] mindset, but I … try not to think about how the wider public’s going to receive it. Because it’s just largely futile, really.”

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