Gig review: Enter Shikari and Fever 333 at First Direct Arena

“Can we test out this sound system?” Enter Shikari frontman Rou Reynolds asks early into his band’s tour kick-off at Leeds’s First Direct Arena. Before him, the throng of several thousand fans, voices rising with every judder wrenched out of the speakers, opens up into a slew of circle pits like a mosher maelstrom. When the beat drops, pandemonium erupts.

The St Albans mainstays have never struggled to fill a space with enough noise, thunder and bodies; even in larger venues, their brand of alternative rock has always pushed at concrete confines with wall-of-sound freneticism.

Even so, these first shows of 2024 are a far cry from their last run on British soil, a string of sweat-crusted club gigs capped by Slam Dunk Festival headline slots, held on the nearby Temple Newsam estate. This return to arenas after seven years splits the difference between assaultive white-eyed intimacy and wind-whipped distance; an impressively polished arena-pop tour-de-force that honours their hardcore roots.

Those concerned over concessions to their musical milieu after number-one album A Kiss for the Whole World need not be concerned; across a career-spanning set that digs out decade-old rarities and eschews several bigger hits, Enter Shikari’s brand of modern-day sturm und drang has not been diluted.

From the state-of-the-world spoken-word address of System… through the blockbuster glitch-screams of Mothership, this is simply them given free reign to deliver maximalist theatre.

Familiar mega-dome trimmings are present and correct; the crushing Anaesthetist plays out against the backdrop of a cod-ominous heart monitor, while Reynolds appears to clamber inside a water tank before Bloodshot with some visual trickery.

But it remains underscored by heart-on-sleeve emotion; the frontman takes a moment atop a tower stack to deliver wonderfully slowed solo renditions of Juggernauts and Gap in the Fence, before the latter erupts into a pounding club coda played out on a B-stage. “I want to dance with you all night, Leeds,” he says, voice cracking, and the sincerity positively bleeds.

Support delivers similar political-punk energy and post-metal growls via Fever 333. Few bands can rival such a headliner for vigour, but the Californian rapcore heavyweights have not earned their place on a spotty reputation.

They hammer the crowd with brutal renditions of Made an America and Hunting Season; frontman Jason Aalon Butler later joins the main event for collaboration single Losing My Grip. It’s a thrillingly potent way to see in the night.