Today, Enter Shikari announce their charity t-shirt collaboration with St Albans City FC, and release a new lockdown green-screen live video for re worked track ‘Warm Smiles Do Not Make You Welcome Here’.
With live performances unable to happen Enter Shikari have taken to their home studios, fired-up the green-screens, and have set to re-working a couple of favourite tracks chosen by their fans on Twitter.
The first of these tracks to see the light of day is ‘Warm Smiles Do Not Make You Welcome Here’, originally taken from the bands ‘A Flash Flood Of Colour’ album which will turn 10 years old on January 2022. The individual video takes were sent to friend and long-time visual collaborator Oleg Rooz in Ukraine, with the instruction to “do whatever you like to it”.
Today the band have also announced a t-shirt collaboration with their local football team St Albans City FC, with all profits from the sales being split between the St Albans & District Foodbank in Hertfordshire, and the Fans Supporting Foodbanks charity in Liverpool, Merseyside; a joint initiative between the official supporters societies of Liverpool and Everton football clubs, benefiting those in need of assistance in the area.
The t-shirt is available here for pre-order, with an approximate ‘release date’ of 19th March.
Rou Reynolds commented:
“We thought we should check whether we can still perform our songs properly after over a year away from the stage! It was nice to revisit this old track, recording it in front of green screens in our respective front rooms, and then giving the footage to our mate Oleg to create a psychedelic beast of a video for.”
Chris Batten commented:
“From the beginning of our partnership with SACFC, the main focus was to strive to give back to the communities that gave us so much, and allowed us to grow. Enter Shikari has also always had a strong connections with Liverpool, and it’s one of the many cities across the country we’ve been made to feel at home in. In a world where there is already far too much division, FSFoodbanks is an amazing example of “rivals” coming together in unity to benefit their people. With foodbank use rising by 74% over the past 5 years, we felt we wanted to do something to help raise a bit of money and also shine a little more light on the hard work they do, and the help they desperately need”.
This news follows the release of ‘The Great Unknown’ video on Boxing Day 2021 (https://youtu.be/wYqJsO1KI3w), taken from the band’s sixth album, ‘Nothing Is True & Everything Is Possible’, which was released in April and became the highest charting album of their career, landing at number 2 in the UK Official Charts.