With Linkin Park nominated at the Grammys for their big comeback album From Zero and its lead single The Emptiness Machine, here's a chance to revisit our cover feature with the band from last year...
As a band who have sold over 100 million records, Linkin Park’s return is one of the biggest music stories of 2024. Not least because their eighth studio album, From Zero, is their first since the tragic passing of their iconic vocalist Chester Bennington in 2017. Here, Music Week meets the new line-up of the band, plus Warner Records and management firm Machine Shop Entertainment, to lift the lid on their bold next chapter…
WORDS: JAMES HICKIE PHOTOS: JAMES MINCHIN III
"You guys have been in our corner with the new stuff from the jump and that is huge,” says Mike Shinoda. It’s September 24, 2024 and Linkin Park are on stage at London’s The O2 Arena. The emotional weight of this moment is immense; the last time they played the venue, in July 2017, was 17 days before the death by suicide of co-vocalist Chester Bennington. It was the loss of a generational talent many thought signified the end for the band.
But here we are, seven years later, in the midst of one of the biggest and most unexpected comebacks of the modern era. That O2 show was one of six arena dates across four continents heralded by a multi-faceted announcement less than three weeks earlier. Not only were the nu-metal titans back and performing live, starting with a secret set livestreamed from Hollywood’s Red Studios in September, but they had a formidable new co-vocalist in Emily Armstrong and a brand new album, From Zero (out now on Warner Records). There was also launch single The Emptiness Machine – which debuted at No.4 to become their highest charting UK hit. The track currently has 164,324 sales to date, according to the Official Charts Company, and has been streamed over 230 million times on Spotify alone.
And yet, for all the indelible sights offered at The O2 – from 18,000 members of one of music’s most committed fanbases rejoicing at the altar of their heroes again, to all the scything lasers – the image that endures is of Shinoda, the grin on his face challenging the lighting rig in the luminosity stakes.
“We’re really enjoying ourselves,” the vocalist reflects now, sitting down with Music Week alongside Armstrong, bassist Dave ‘Phoenix’ Farrell, DJ/video director Joe Hahn and new drummer/co-producer Colin Brittain, who replaced Rob Bourdon. Guitarist Brad Delson, still part of the line-up creatively, isn’t touring with them.
“Each show has been getting a little looser, a little bit more fun,” continues Shinoda. “Sometimes we use a basketball analogy, that when a team is really in sync and has chemistry, that’s when the dunks happen. For us, having some shows in front of people under our belts matters. There was a period where we weren’t sure we’d be playing together again, so to be able to do it is obviously incredible!”
Armstrong, meanwhile, is clearly relishing her new role.
“I welcome the challenge, but it was hard to know what [I was] getting into until I dived in,” she says. “It’s even overwhelming just thinking about it; you’re trying to process it, but you can’t, so I’m just cruising. I’ve got one job, so I do that, and everything else falls into place.”
Fellow new arrival Brittain is, like Armstrong, a decade younger than the rest of the band. He agrees it’s best not to think too much about the bigger picture.
“When you have a huge mountain you have to climb, you can’t look at the whole thing,” he says. “These guys are such great leaders and have so much confidence in their art, so for me it was a case of focusing on doing the things I do well.”
For Shinoda, integrating new personnel has brought additional skills to the fore, meaning fresh challenges for his own ideas.
“They have capabilities that were new to us,” he says, noting Brittain’s role in shaping the transitions during their setlist and the new pair’s reworked version of early track My December.
Today, Music Week joins the band back at The O2, inside sister venue IndigO2. It’s here they are rehearsing for their performance as part of The 2024 League Of Legends World Championship Finals, for which From Zero’s second single, Heavy Is The Crown, serves as the official anthem. The track is racing towards 100 million streams on Spotify, where the band have more than 55m monthly listeners.
We are a real team, all in the trenches together
Tom Corson, Warner Records
As we speak, 300 Linkin Park obsessives are attending a playback of From Zero, silent disco-style in a nearby bar. It’s fair to say that many of those involved in the campaign are just as excited as their fans about their return.
“Linkin Park are one of the most iconic rock bands of all time,” posits Joe Kentish, president of Warner Records, recalling the impact they made with their diamond-certified 2000 debut Hybrid Theory. “They burst onto the scene with such originality and intensity that it changed the genre forever, and they have continued to evolve and push the boundaries ever since.”
“The impact of their live shows was, and is, immense,” adds MD Jen Ivory. “The sight and sound of thousands of voices singing every word is breathtaking. It’s a testament to the enduring connection between the band and their fans, which remains as strong as ever.”
But while Linkin Park’s current momentum feels unstoppable, the first steps to this grand return weren’t nearly so fast-paced. It would first require a lot of thought, and a lot of soul-searching...
Initially, it was all a case of Shinoda, Farrell, Hahn (and later, Delson) reconvening privately. They did so without putting a label on what they were doing, staving off the need to consider if it was a continuation of Linkin Park, another project, or nothing at all.
“People imagine that you have the finish line in sight when you start…” says Farrell, suggesting that wasn’t quite the reality.
Mike Shinoda had already articulated his grief after Chester Bennington’s death, most notably on his compelling debut solo album, 2018’s Post Traumatic. “The changes in my perspective and the journey, emotionally, mentally, that I took this year made the music,” he told Music Week at the time.
In contrast, Linkin Park’s bassist hadn’t had that creative catharsis. He was understandably more guarded about the prospect.
“I was so paralysed by going down the road of needing to know all the answers before we started,” explains Farrell. “When Joe, Mike and I talked about writing, for me at least, it was a case of, ‘What can we make and do we like it?’ First we needed to ask, ‘Can we get together for a concentrated period of time, staying in each other’s lives in that way?’ That gradually moved us forwards.”
Given this cautious approach, there wasn’t a particular song that resulted in a lightning-strike moment. Instead, an incremental but unignorable sense of intention crept over the collective.
“At a certain point, definitely, it felt that what we were doing was in the spirit of Linkin Park,” explains Farrell. “Mike said it at one point that to call it something else, or pretend it wasn’t that, would have felt very uncomfortable and weird.”
Getting from that realisation to becoming active again was, oddly, more straightforward.
“By that point, we’d answered those questions Dave was talking about,” explains Shinoda. “In the beginning, we were just trying to take on the challenges or the things that were grey areas, one at a time. So we’d be working and we’d realise that we’d done two weeks where Colin had been there every day, and that felt really great, so we [thought we] should keep inviting him. Or we talked about the amazing job that Emily was doing [on vocals], with so much confidence and fire. We had invited people in and it was those two we had a real connection with. Those were a couple of the many answers that showed up.”
Linkin Park are one of the most iconic rock bands of all time
Joe Kentish, Warner Records
There was never any doubt new music would be in the offing.
“The album was the driving force and we were writing songs to figure out who the band was,” says Shinoda, adding that they initially tried sessions with external co-writers before whittling down the process to the six band members.
“The album came into focus as the band came into focus,” he adds. “By the time we’d made a record and included Emily and Colin in how to make a show, then came the fun part. That’s when we thought about including the fans, to make it an event.”
Touring began to emerge as a possibility after an exciting gig proposal was put to the band.
“We’d been offered a show that was really worth considering, which was a year, 18 months away,” says Shinoda. “It got to the idea of getting on stage happening. When we first talked to Emily, it wasn’t, ‘Hey, do you want to be the singer?’; it was, ‘Do you want to do this show? Does that sound weird or does it sound great?’”
“There never really was a time when we weren’t talking about music,” reflects Ryan DeMarti, who manages the band with Bill Silva and Trish Evangelista at Machine Shop Entertainment. “We celebrated the 20th anniversaries of Hybrid Theory (1,992,909 sales, OCC) and Meteora (1,034,023 sales) with extensive box sets featuring unreleased gems and a greatest hits collection, Papercuts, to name a few highlights. Throughout all those projects celebrating the catalogue, I always felt confident the time would come when things would organically come together for the band to move forward.”
During that catalogue activity, some fans would inevitably think a reunion was on the cards. Shinoda wanted to leave them in no doubt about what was happening this time around.
“Usually with launches, a lot of time I’ll be trying to hold back information, or temper their expectations,” he explains. “Because the fans can be so imaginative and get so excited that they start assuming crazy shit is going to happen, that actually isn’t going to happen. The idea for this was: all of the exciting things you think could happen, all of them are happening!”
“I couldn’t imagine how it would come together,” Armstrong says in praise of the logistics of the roll out. “It was so strategic and genius from the band and crew. I’ve never been a part of something like that. It’s bigger than me, it’s bigger than us – this band belongs to the world.”
Armstrong’s perspective is a fascinating one, given that her trajectory is the stuff of a Hollywood film. Before making her name with LA rock band Dead Sara, she first picked up a guitar aged 11, and began singing in earnest at 14. This was right around the time Hybrid Theory was setting the world ablaze. Like so many listeners, she was enthralled by what she heard: particularly Chester Bennington’s voice.
“That mix of singing and screaming, of energy and empathy that he possessed had a monumental impact on me that made me think, ‘I’m going to be this type of singer,’” recalls Armstrong. “And now, somehow, I’ve worked my way up from singing punk rock, to singing folk, to where I am now. Chester continues to be an inspiration for me, and has shaped me so much as a musician, in how I sing and wanting to make the listener feel something.”
Armstrong first met the band in 2019, writing with them even then, with no agenda or idea how it would pan out. Would she be a guest vocalist? Would she perform some live duties? For a time, no one knew – until they did. So what would the 14-year-old Emily make of this?
“She’d be very happy!” laughs Armstrong. “When you’re that age, you’re obsessed and you wish you could stay that way. Then you get older and become a little jaded as that obsession evolves into wanting to be a better musician. But when I joined the band, it triggered that ‘Holy fuck!’ feeling, which I put into singing those songs with fans who feel the same.”
“And she’s doing an incredible job!” beams Shinoda, before turning to drummer Brittain. “They both are, but I’ve already told them that!”
How, then, did Linkin Park keep this huge reunion, new album and global live dates a secret? With some difficulty, according to Armstrong, who had to exercise caution for fear that loose lips might sink ships.
“It was hard to keep it to myself, so if I was hanging out with friends, I didn’t drink because it’s truth serum!” she says.
“We had to go out to the crew, to people who mix front of house, to managers of other bands as we looked for openers for next year,” reveals Shinoda. “So all these people knew and yet none of them really told anybody.”
“It required a lot of trust in a lot of people,” agrees Ryan DeMarti. “We held venues and promo appearances with bookers that didn’t know what artist would be performing. We give a lot of credit to our partners at Warner and WME; without their reputations and trusted relationships none of it would have been possible.”
Admittedly, not everyone was so discreet. In April, Jay Gordon, frontman of industrial rock band Orgy, was discussing his history with Linkin Park during a radio interview and let slip, “I hear they [sic] got a girl singer now.” Despite adding, “Don’t quote me on that”, that’s exactly what the music press did, prompting Gordon to issue a retraction: “I know nothing about any of that,” read his statement on Facebook.
“[Jay] said a thing he’d heard and they ran with it,” says Shinoda. “I don’t blame him. He definitely wasn’t the only person who heard that rumour. That we got to the launch and the only piece of info anybody had was ‘I think it’s a female singer’ is unbelievable.”
Linkin Park got away with it to the extent that when they eventually shared a countdown clock signifying something was coming, fans assuming it was an impending reunion were still speculating who the singer might be. Sum 41’s Deryck Whibley, who performed Linkin Park tracks with Shinoda at Reading & Leeds Festival in 2018 was touted, with online sleuths noting he had his own announcement the very same day (which ultimately turned out to be a book tour).
“There were so many people with announcements then,” laughs Shinoda. “I felt bad for them because everyone had to go back and clarify that their thing wasn’t as big a deal.”
When the news arrived, it was greeted with a deluge of excitable stories and posts, as well as positive appraisals of The Emptiness Machine and Armstrong’s appointment. But then came the backlash. Detractors were quick to identify her connection to the Church Of Scientology and her perceived support of actor Danny Masterson, the former star of That 70s Show, who was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison last September for the rape of two women. Armstrong issued a statement clarifying she had attended Masterson’s pre-trial hearing as an observer but realised her mistake, while taking the opportunity to lend her unequivocal support to victims of sexual assault.
“I always try to see the good in people, and I misjudged [Masterson],” read her statement. “I have never spoken with him since. Unimaginable details emerged and he was later found guilty. To say it as clearly as possible: I do not condone abuse or violence against women, and I empathise with the victims of these crimes.”
So, how has Armstrong dealt with the public scrutiny?
“When I see someone else going through something, I think it affects me more than actually being the recipient,” she says quietly of slings and arrows she’s no stranger to, having been in bands for 20-plus years. “It’s weird and I didn’t think I would feel that way. It’s almost like I was built for it – there’s a part of my personality that [means] I’m able to take it.”
“We talked about the scrutiny about two months before the launch show,” adds Shinoda. “And we said, ‘It’s going to get nasty. We don’t even know what form of nasty we will get, but at the very least it will be: this music sucks, you guys suck – we want something that this is not.’ And we’ve had that on every record we’ve put out since the first one.”
“I get so mad at anything directed at Colin and Emily,” says Farrell. “But [anything directed] at Mike and Joe, also. The band is a protective circle, which is one of the best things about a band – you can huddle and say, ‘OK, this is what we’re doing, it’s us against everybody.’ You’ve got to be able to close ranks and have everybody’s back.”
“[Emily and Colin] have had their fair share of getting their ass kicked in life and been persistent enough to keep going,” adds Hahn. “So they’re pretty resilient and tough.”
Given the overwhelming tragedy the band has already experienced, and with pressure exerted on the artist community from multiple angles, do they think there’s enough support offered to musicians?
“The music industry is a business, so you have to find your own tribe,” suggests Hahn. “You have to form alliances with people you can call friends, so you protect them and they protect you.”
“We all helped each other through communication and compassion,” says Ryan DeMarti of how the band’s team weathered Chester Bennington’s loss, for instance. “It’s amazing how much progress can be made with open and honest conversations. It sounds simple but it’s at the heart of everything we do.”
DeMarti has worked with the band his entire career, ever since [former co-manager] Andy Gould gave him a job as an intern.
“Every day has been a learning experience,” he says. “I’ve just held on to that freight train, doing my best to help keep it on the tracks.”
Tom Corson, COO & co-chairman of Warner Records in the US, agrees that the operation is the result of a remarkable group effort.
“We’re a real team, all in the trenches together,” he says. “Because of our long history, it has always been incredibly collaborative.”
“Linkin Park are moving into this next stage with fearlessness and passion,” says Jen Ivory. “They are honouring Chester’s legacy in the best way possible – by delivering incredible music for their fans.”
Linkin Park have always been a band operating at the cutting edge of things, but much has changed in the seven years since they were last active. They now return to a streaming-led, TikTok super-charged industry with rapid developments in AI also dominating conversation. They are keener on some developments than others, but appreciate that everything has its place.
“I think TikTok is nonsense,” deadpans Hahn. “That being said, people love nonsense. If you look at our videos, there’s a seriousness to them, an elevation, hopefully, that we strive for. We’re not telling silly jokes and doing little dances. We like that stuff, we just don’t put it in our videos, because that’s not the place. If we want to do that, we’ll go to Instagram or TikTok and share those moments.”
“That’s the way we do it,” clarifies Mike. “For other artists it might be the most important thing. There’s nothing wrong with that if they’re good at it and enjoy it. I do feel bad for some of the artists that Colin and I have worked with who feel they have to do it. They hate doing it, and everyone is telling them they must do it in order to get to the next stage of their career. That’s really disappointing; it has nothing to do with their music or who they are as a person, they’re just being told it’s part of the job.”
And if Shinoda squirms at the mention of AI, it’s for good reason.
“People have asked if we’d do an AI Chester, or a hologram, which weirds me out,” he explains, before shifting to its less “strange” applications.
“I heard that one company is doing an AI voice, where you can sing a vocal and change your voice into someone else’s,” he says. “That would be really useful for someone who’s pitching songs to another artist. So if you’re going to pitch a song to Olivia Rodrigo and you can say, ‘Here’s how the vocal goes’ and make it sound like Olivia. That’s not going to go out to fans, that’s for her to wrap her head around whether or not she should sing the song.”
“People forget that an amplified, distorted guitar is a piece of technology,” adds Farrell. “AI is a different animal – it can be used well and artistically, or it can be used heavy-handedly. At its base it’s neutral, so how you use it is what we should be focusing on.”
They are honouring Chester's legacy by delivering incredible music to their fans
Jen Ivory, Warner Records/Parlophone
As for the band’s team, they harbour no fears for their place in the modern industry.
“They transitioned comfortably into the streaming era,” says Danny Corr, senior marketing manager at Warner Records. “And they’re still so relevant – just look at the impact of The Emptiness Machine, which got one of the highest chart placings for a rock band for a long time.”
“That song was an immediate stand-out when Aaron [Bay-Schuck, CEO & co-chairman, Warner Records] and I first heard the record,” recalls Tom Corson. “Even before it was fully finished, we knew it had to be the first single.”
Now, the focus is fully on From Zero. It’s an album that encompasses all of the elements that made millions of fans fall in love with Linkin Park in the first place, all while sounding fresh and innovative. “I love all 32 minutes of From Zero from start to finish,” praises Ryan DeMarti. This mix of past and present, Jen Ivory suggests, is an essential part of standing out as a rock act in the modern age.
“Musically, it’s crucial to strike a balance,” she says. “The new material should echo what made the artist successful in the past, while also pushing new creative boundaries. A banger that excites potential new fans, DSPs and radio alike is a big help! With rock, you can’t rely on streaming and physical alone, so you can’t leave any lever out.”
Team LP note that From Zero is already reigniting interest in the rest of the band’s music – exemplified by their singles collection, Papercuts, re-entering the Top 10 since the group’s return last month.
“The major focus right now is the new album,” says Corr. “But at the same time we want fans to re-engage with the band’s catalogue whilst also introducing it to the new generation that we have certainly picked up since their return in September.”
Plus, there will be more touring in 2025, which will blow people away, “whether you’ve never seen them before or a dozen times,” according to DeMarti.
“The production is being turned up multiple notches,” he says. “And with a couple of decades of music to play, it’s a fulfilling night of iconic hits, rotating deep cuts and new favourites.”
But what actually constitutes success for Linkin Park going forward?
“We just have to do our best with the things we have control over,” suggests Shinoda. “It’s about keeping ourselves focused so that we’re being inspired, detail-oriented and enjoying the process.”
The more interesting question for him is whether, having come from a rock scene that has largely become diffused, they feel any pressure to represent the idea of a ‘band’ in an era of pop and hip-hop?
“It’s hard to answer,” he offers. “The more people you have in the group, the more complex the dynamic, and the more chances it’s not going to work so well. At a certain point, there are going to be arguments – and can you have those and still be pointing towards the same creative destination, or at least one that’s worth listening to? Do we want to be poster children for what a band is? Part of me says no, and part of me says yes.”
Shinoda will continue to wrestle with the answer as Linkin Park enter their exciting new chapter.
“We’re not a typical band,” Shinoda concludes. “We do a lot of things differently. That’s part of what makes it work.”
