![]() Linkin Park never represented any of that for me, so at first I shocked myself at just how heavily the news of Chester Bennington’s suicide hit me. That all encompassing teenage enthusiasm that’s been an unshakable part of the culture since The Beach Boys at the absolute latest. And by making an album like this now, I think I’m standing behind that.When we talk about formative influences in music, it’s usually an artist or band that you patterned yourself after: dressed like they did, plastered your bedroom walls with their posters, decorated every surface -physical and digital- with their lyrics. “But I’ve always thought there’s something OK - if not awesome - about being on the outside of things. “There are definitely people who think Linkin Park is uncool,” he said with a laugh. 15.)īut how the album fares is less important than what it represents, Shinoda said. And it’s set to tour North America this year with Thirty Seconds to Mars, known by many for its Oscar-winning movie-star frontman, Jared Leto. The next evening it performed again, this time for broadcast on terrestrial radio from Clear Channel’s iHeartRadio Theater. On Tuesday the band played a KROQ-sponsored show, live-streamed online, at the so-called Red Bull Sound Space in Culver City. ![]() Like any major-label act with a big-budget project to sell, Linkin Park isn’t leaving the album’s reception to chance. “I think that our male listeners are going to dig it, but it’s a little early for me to really know what we have.” “I’m eager to see how the record does in its first week,” said Lisa Worden, music director at L.A.’s influential modern-rock station KROQ-FM (106.7). Indeed, he described consulting Linkin Park’s management for advice on the commercial viability of an aggressive rock album in 2014 and said he was told it was hardly a sure thing. Still, Shinoda insisted that “The Hunting Party” was not a product of business savvy - the band’s attempt to exploit an underserved market - but of its determination to follow a creative impulse. “But looking back, I’d say if we’d gone any further in that direction I would’ve been bummed out.” “‘Living Things’ was a very careful balance of sonic elements,” he said, referring to traces of pop and dance music. Shinoda acknowledged that the group’s recent work may not be among its best. The band’s previous two albums sold far fewer copies than its early albums, while “Living Things” in particular seemed to lack the energy that used to define its music. Yet Linkin Park’s return to a more vigorous sound might also have been motivated by the recognition that it was beginning to flail. There’s no disagreeing with Bennington’s point about a void: Hard rock has never been less relevant to the larger musical conversation than it is right now, with only a handful of bands - Queens of the Stone Age, Tool, Foo Fighters - making records that attract even a fraction of the attention that Beyonce’s and Luke Bryan’s get. Where’s the chutzpah in that? he asked, albeit using an unprintable word for part of the male anatomy. “We see a void,” the singer said, in which listeners are being inundated with “safety rock sold as edgy alternative music.” As an example, Bennington sang the high-pitched acoustic-guitar riff from Imagine Dragons’ “It’s Time.” That fanbase - which drove sales of Linkin Park’s 2000 debut, “Hybrid Theory,” to sales of more than 10 million copies - has been neglected of late, according to Bennington. “For a couple of records they went off and did something different,” Malakian went on, referring to “Living Things” and its spacey 2010 predecessor, “A Thousand Suns.” “But I think they were trying to make something that connected with the harder audience that was their first fanbase to begin with.” “They were just in the mood to do something heavy again,” said Daron Malakian of System of a Down, who co-wrote and played guitar on “Rebellion.” (Other guests on the album include Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Helmet’s Page Hamilton.) Produced by Shinoda and guitarist Brad Delson (following the band’s lengthy stint with Rick Rubin), it marks an unexpected - and possibly risky - shift for a group whose early hits did as much as any to pave the way for Imagine Dragons and Bastille, to name two inheritors that have found commercial success with a softer-edged version of Linkin Park’s synthed-up rock. The result, released Tuesday, is “The Hunting Party,” Linkin Park’s sixth studio album and its most aggressive in years, with fuzzy guitars, breakneck tempos and as much screaming as singing.
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