Hyperfocus #10: Linkin Park and the musical restlessness that defines them

As the band releases their first album in seven years, I revisit their musical journey and look at the legacy Chester Bennington left behind, and the shoes Emily Armstrong needs to fill... or not.

Posters promoting Linkin Park’s new album—their first with new vocalist Emily Armstrong—on the walls of a bank in Hong Kong.

I revisit Meteora, Linkin Park’s second album, at the coffee shop where I usually write.

The moment the opening instrumental plays, I already feel weird.

This is whiplash. This is definitely whiplash. I can’t be listening to this album through my earphones, plugged to a laptop, through a streaming service. It should be on a CD player at the living room in the house where I grew up, the volume turned to a reasonably loud level.

Am I really listening to this in 2024? Shouldn’t it be twenty years earlier? Isn’t it 2004, when I worried about whether I was acting foolishly in front of this really cute girl named Chrystel?

And then it hits me. Why am I the one having these memories? Linkin Park isn’t my band. It’s my sister’s.

Kim’s the one who’s always been into the band. Or is it our cousin, Jeanna? Anyway, they both shared a love of Linkin Park. Or maybe it’s a crush on Mike Shinoda or Joe Hahn. I’m honestly not really sure how it started. Linkin Park isn’t even the type of band either of us would listen to. We weren’t into the harder stuff; that’s not what we were raised on. But the next thing I know, Meteora was already being played regularly on both the CD stereo at home and the car stereo when we were being driven to school. We had repeatedly watched the VCD¹ that came with the album, showing behind-the-scenes clips during recording. My sister was downloading photos of the band on the Internet, and just browsing through them whenever it was her turn on the desktop.

I may have been forced, more or less, to listen to Meteora two decades ago, but it’s that familiarity that came back to me in that coffee shop in 2024. How the songs seamlessly transitioned to each other, how most of them start with a hard enough introduction that belies the fact that it gets harder in the middle—no, more epic in the middle. How “Don’t Stay” gets down when it hits the chorus. How “Breaking The Habit” turns the sound of flutes into something sinister, but not so. How “Faint”—I think it’s my favorite off the record—tantalizes you with the synths before it gets down.

I don’t get that same feeling with Hybrid Theory, the album that broke them through from all the nu-metal crossing over to pop radio at the time. Kim had a copy of that album, too, sure, and when I listened back to it (in the same coffee shop, even) I get the same, almost-Pavlovian “oh wow!” hits whenever a new track comes on. But it’s Meteora that does it for me, because it was our album, the way Hybrid Theory was for those who connected intimately with the band’s songs on anger, isolation and self-loathing.

I’m not saying the following sentence because of that, however Meteora is a more refined version of Linkin Park’s vision. It does not move the needle much from its predecessor—both were produced by Don Gilmore, who has also worked for the likes of Good Charlotte, Korn and Avril Lavigne—but it feels more refined and cohesive, an imperceptible perfecting of the formula that doesn’t smooth over the rough edges. So the release of its successor, Minutes to Midnight, must have come as a bit of a surprise to their fans.

Rick Rubin, who produced that record is known for distilling the sound of the artists he works with to its purest forms, which must’ve taken some getting used to considering how the band prided in their production and the layers they come up with. (Again, “Breaking the Habit”, and perhaps the mere existence of turntablist Joe Hahn in the lineup.) But then, we must have seen it coming, how Linkin Park, from the very beginning, has been musically restless. They weren’t wildly adventurous in the sense of changing genres at every turn, but they were always poking at the edges and seeing how much further they can explore. I mean, Hybrid Theory was technically followed by a remix album, Reanimation².

And to Rick’s credit, he did help push Linkin Park’s sound to new dimensions, even if it meant some elements that defined the first two records disappearing in the mix. Minutes to Midnight had less of Mike’s rapping, but it coaxed the almost-bypassed melodious nature of Chester Bennington’s voice. The instruments aren’t as crunchy, and Joe’s scratch work isn’t as evident, but what you do hear from them serves the songs.

It was a necessary move too, considering how they were moving away from anguished songs and towards bigger themes. Hybrid Theory and Meteora were characterized by songs about “I”—how each pain and trauma was because they weren’t good enough. (Us knowing Chester’s troubled childhood lent more credence to that context.) But the Rick Rubin era saw a shift to the “you”—we can call “The Little Things Give You Away” love songs, right?—and then, to the “us”, as the group cast their sights on societal issues, especially from A Thousand Suns, what with its references to Robert Oppenheimer before Christopher Nolan got his hands on that story.

That album saw the band move further towards experimentation, particularly shedding most of its nu-metal bones in favor of increased consistency and better service to the concept. Somehow, they got away with it. Only in my recent revisiting did I understand the comparison some critics made to Radiohead’s Kid A—I, too, would have thought of them as unlikely bed fellows—both in its musical boundary-pushing and its themes. But somehow they got away with it. Maybe it is Rick’s tendency to distill. Maybe it’s because you hear tracks like the deceptively anthemic “Waiting for the End” and you shrug and think, this is still the Linkin Park I know.

The risk, however, with being a musically restless band is that you will have to work harder to keep your followers on board. It’s really isn’t that tall of an order—again, Radiohead—but if you’re a band whose earliest work reflected your fans’ youthful anguish, then the task becomes a little more daunting. Kim told me she started dropping out of Linkin Park by Minutes to Midnight, and only because “What I’ve Done” was part of the Transformers soundtrack, a movie franchise she was apparently never keen on. I wouldn’t call it an abandonment of values. She still has fondness for the group, and always will. I suppose she also moved on to other musical hyperfixations, and moving from university to the labor force was a factor too.

I myself had also moved on. By the time Living Things was released, I had run miles through my own musical articulation, understanding the appeal of the smooth jazz I grew up on and also stumbling upon the dynamics of the mid-noughties British indie revival. I still see Linkin Park as an unlikely starting point to my love of music, but I had gone so far down my own rabbit hole that I failed to appreciate how that album brought back some of the rage of their earlier work while keeping with the sonic evolution most evident in their middle act.

And I guess the band was, too. As the story goes, Mike Shinoda decided to scrap early material for their sixth album after getting positive feedback from the band for it—and particularly from Rick Rubin, who expressed initial surprised at how much poppier it was from their usual work. The Hunting Party would end up being a deliberate pushback, both a return to their earlier sound and a push back against the state of alternative radio in the mid-2010s. (Mike would describe the likes of Haim and Chvrches as “[sounding] like Disney commercial music”, which does feel like a slam at the bands I listen to… although I wouldn’t defend Vampire Weekend in the same way.³) But even weirder for the band, its follow-up, One More Light, was pretty much a complete 180, embracing a more genre-ambiguous sound that fans and critics decried as “selling out”.

Listening back to both albums, I began thinking if we have been unfair to the group. I myself wasn’t so keen on both, especially on the latter, but I can now affirm that a lot of it is down to my own emotional and nostalgic connections to the group. (Perhaps it’s also because the members were so vehemently protective of both records, with Chester Bennington particularly inflamed by allegations of selling out on the latter.) I had to remind myself that by at this point, Linkin Park was firmly and solely in charge of their own direction—surprising it only happened now considering how involved they have always been from the beginning. Mike and guitarist Brad Delson shared producer duties this time, which tells you at least that whatever the albums sounded like was the band’s decision, and the band’s decision alone.

Musical whiplash aside, that era could be best defined by their more collaborative nature. Perhaps feeling there’s nowhere else new they could go without being radically untrue to their fundamentals, they decided to embrace the elder roles and play around with the Rolodex. While the names they enlisted—Tom Morello, Daron Malakian, Page Hamilton and Rakim on The Hunting Party; Kiiara, Pusha T and Stormzy on One More Light—are not really in the genres I play with, I can still sense how musically rejuvenating their presence has been, particularly in providing the band with new perspectives to play with. I’m particularly thinking of “Heavy”, the duet with Kiiara on One More Light, inevitably dismissed as the very pop schlock they were railing against just a couple of years prior—but how it served as yet another showcase of Chester’s melodic nature.

Listening back now, you realize that the underlying tenderness of One More Light—apart from being a reflection of the prevalent music of the time, something that the band was never ashamed to absorb throughout its career so far—is a full circle moment thematically. The final tracks, in particular, focus back on the “I” and the “you” of their earlier work. Chester may not have written the title track as well as the album closer “Sharp Edges”—he had long pointed out how he and Mike have united thematically despite their different backgrounds and contexts—but you can tell it’s his perspective, and his perspective alone. Two months after the album was released, he would he found dead in his home, of an apparent suicide.

I remember when that news broke. My sister and I lived separately at this point, and I grappled with how to break the news to her.

Linkin Park would not produce anything for six years after that, although Mike was keen to point out that the band was a continuing concern. The twentieth anniversaries of both Hybrid Theory and Meteora were marked with rereleases, bittersweet in that the “new” material that came with them were a reminder both of the band’s potent presence in our adolescent years, as well as what we had lost with Chester Bennington: one of rock’s most versatile and expressive vocals, comfortable both in the heavier and the more tender moments, in both contexts colorful, vulnerable and reflective of our own stories as much as it was reflective of his. He suffused his soul in his music, and it remains difficult to imagine Linkin Park without him.

I cannot imagine what big shoes Emily Armstrong has to fill. Setting aside how different our cultural conversations are in 2024 versus 2003—when news of her recruitment was revealed a few months back, some folks were already seeking to cancel her for being a Scientologist and for showing up at the trial of convicted rapist Danny Masterson⁴—she comes in to fill a role that was very much defined by her predecessor. The comparisons are inevitable. Can she growl like Chester? Can she croon like Chester?

They are unfair questions, in a way. Linkin Park has always been musically restless. The circumstances behind these latest changes⁵ may be very unfortunate, but the decision to soldier on says as much about the creative engines that continue to chug along. That said, their new album, From Zero, illustrates how long that journey will be—not because they are incapable, but because things have to settle down before we can fully see the band’s new groove. Mike and Emily aren’t harmonizing yet, for instance, and I have to get used to the idea of Linkin Park doing more explicit call-and-answer stuff in their songs.

But that aside, the new album feels familiar, almost like a restart. Maybe it’s because I had been listening to the entire discography in the past week, but I found myself singing Meteora songs on top of the From Zero stuff. But there is no reason to fear. Emily will find her space, and already, in songs like “IGYEIH”, she is able to take us on an equally exhilarating ride.

But equally fun was being able to talk to my sister about it. We were talking about twenty years ago, but we were not the people we were twenty years ago. For one, we were already dissecting what From Zero meant for the group, and she was going on about how Emily can improve her footing with the band. It’s going to be a pretty exciting ride from here on out, I say. And knowing Linkin Park’s restlessness—no, their inability to rest on their laurels—I’m certain there’s a long way to go still.

1. Only in the process of writing this essay did I understand that the VCD format—that means “video CD”—was only really a thing here in Asia, as a sort of in-between format between the VHS and the DVD. Some time in the early 2000s there was a boom in counterfeit VCDs of movies and concerts, complete with stretched movie posters (or non-sensical ones altogether) and the occasional guessing game of whether you really got a VCD of, say, Titanic and not, say, an adult version of it.

2. Reanimation was a difficult album to listen to if you didn’t get it, like I did when it was first released, but it is noteworthy for explicitly laying out the soundscapes that Linkin Park would explore for the rest of their careers. While I say that the band’s most collaborative era came with The Hunting Party, this album featuring the likes of Chali 2na, Black Thought and Aceyalone—not to mention Marilyn Manson, whose remix of “By Myself” only appeared in Japanese stores—hints at their wide oeuvre of inspiration. And there would be a second remix album, Recharged, which featured a new collaboration with Steve Aoki.

3. I don’t really dislike Vampire Weekend. It’s just a thing I’ve always done from the old music blog.

4. Emily acknowledged that she did appear in the trial in support of Masterson, but realized later on that she should not have done so, and has disavowed violence against women.

5. Apart from Emily, long-time drummer Rob Bourdon departed the band, to be replaced by Colin Brittain. In addition, Brad decided to stop touring with the band to focus on behind-the-scenes matters.