Linkin Park discusses new singer Emily Armstrong, tour dates, new album 'From Zero' and the band's next chapter in a digital cover story interview.
bandmates one day in the studio last year. They were recording the vocals for a wall-rattling thrasher, and Shinoda, the band’s co-lead vocalist and main producer, wanted his voice to match the pummeling production — so he tried something a little different.
When he opened his mouth, he let loose with rare ferocity: After years of singing, rapping and harmonizing, Shinoda emitted a full-blooded scream.it a scream, though? Is it?” the 47-year-old asks, mischievous grin widening. “It’s kind of an awkward yell.” He leans back on a couch in the lounge of Los Angeles’ EastWest Studios, where Linkin Park recorded part of the new album that track would ultimately appear on; bassist Dave Farrell is sitting next to him, and recalls commanding Shinoda to “push more” after hearing him wail in the booth. “I don’t think I’m capable of doing more than that,” says Shinoda — then he looks across the couch, toward Emily Armstrong. “My voice isn’t built like Emily’s voice,” Shinoda adds. Armstrong, a seasoned scream-singer, subtly nods and replies, “I got you.”groups of the 21st century is roaring back — with a new lineup, album, tour and collective outlook. The band announced Sept. 5 that Armstrong, the veteran leader of power-rock hell-raisers Dead Sara, would be Shinoda’s new co-vocalist, while studio polymath Colin Brittain would sign on as drummer and co-producer.With Armstrong and Brittain on board — as well as original members Shinoda, Farrell, guitarist/co-producer Brad Delson and DJ/visual director Joe Hahn — Linkin Park will release, its eighth studio album, on Nov. 15 through longtime label Warner Records. The band will also play six arena shows across four continents this fall before “touring heavily” in 2025, according to Shinoda. And with a two-decade catalog of hard-rock hits — as well as plenty of fresh material — to bring back to live audiences globally, the band is aiming for stadiums next year. Linkin Park’s new agency, WME, expects sky-high ticket demand for a band that has grossed over $120 million during its career, according to Billboard Boxscore. “Linkin Park is one of the biggest touring rock bands of our time,” says John Marx, partner and agent at WME, which the band quietly joined earlier this year. “The excitement their fans will have, being able to see and celebrate them after seven years, will be massive.” Linkin Park planned this new era — including the arena shows that will kick off Sept. 11 with a hometown show at the Kia Forum in L.A. — in total secrecy, with abstract rumors swirling across the Linkin Park fan sphere as the band once again became active, hammered out new songs and rehearsed. Months of outside speculation was followed by a week-and-a-half of band-sanctioned teasers — all leading to this week, when Linkin Park announced Armstrong and Brittain as new additions, launched a global performance livestream and released the hard-charging anthem “The Emptiness Machine” as“An immense amount of thought and care go into everything the band does,” says Ryan DeMarti, the band’s longtime manager at Machine Shop Entertainment. “I feel the utmost confidence that commitment shines through in every social media post, every press release, every liner note.” Understandably, Linkin Park is starting its next chapter with heightened sensitivity, as the first band project since Bennington’s tragic death in 2017. Following a tribute concert featuring dozens of special-guest vocalists that October, Linkin Park’s members went their separate ways: Shinoda released the contemplative solo albumin 2018, then toured the world to commune with grieving fans, while Delson, Farrell, Hahn and drummer Rob Bourdon largely stopped making music., the future of the band remained uncertain. What could a version of Linkin Park without Bennington’s fragile scream sound like? “Part of working under darkness was simply the fact that we didn’t know how far we would get in our efforts,” Hahn explains. “We didn’t want to set ourselves or anyone else up for disappointment if we weren’t able to do it. This has been years of struggling to understand what it can and should be.” There is plenty of historical precedent for mega-selling rock acts reinventing themselves following the death of an iconic frontman: Think Queen with Adam Lambert, Alice in Chains with William DuVall or Sublime with Bradley Nowell’s son, Jakob. If Linkin Park simply re-formed as a live act — with a new vocalist re-creating Bennington’s parts on hits like “In the End,” “Numb” and “One Step Closer” — it’d be able to book sizable venues. The band’s numbers have been, and remain, huge: 22.7 million combined copies of the group’s seven studio albums sold in the United States to date, according to Luminate, with millions of monthly streams seven years after the band’s last activity and most recent album. And early last year, “Lost,” an unearthed single released as part of the“The importance of their deep musical catalog cannot be overstated,” says Tom Corson, Warner Records’ co-chairman/COO. “Linkin Park’s songs are timeless — they’ve become part of the cultural fabric, and we actively promote and market their music, whether it’s of the past, the present or the future.”recall the quicksilver rap-rock aggression that made the band diamond-sellers; others iterate on specific eras, like the pulverizing metal of 2014’s. Across the board, they carry a sense of pace and urgency — as if the band members refused to let up or phone in one moment of their grand return. At the heart of the group’s new identity is the interplay between Shinoda, who sounds revitalized as both quick-twitch rapper and heartfelt crooner, and Armstrong, whose formidable rasp can both wallop and deeply affect rock listeners. On “The Emptiness Machine,” their voices collide over cleanly produced guitar blasts and form a magnetic tension. “It’s a great introduction to the record, and to this lineup,” Delson says of the single. “The song starts with Mike, and Emily’s vocal kind of sneaks in surreptitiously and then hits you hard over the head in the second chorus, and just builds intensity with both of their vocals through the end of the song.” Shinoda and Armstrong also complement each other in person, cracking jokes in between studio anecdotes and communicating a shared passion to nail this next iteration of Linkin Park. “Now that we’re getting ready to do some shows, it’s been better than I imagined,” Shinoda says. “Emily was always going to be able to hit the notes and scream the parts. It’ll be a question of, ‘How does it land with people?’ And I don’t know how it will. But I know that, when I hear it, I love it.”I could give you 100 different answers, because my brain was in 100 different places. At one point early on — this is going back to pre-COVID, so call it 2018 or 2019 — Joe, Mike and myself were starting to write a little bit, or just get together and say, “Let’s do some stuff and see if we even like it; let’s be creative together.” There wasn’t an endgame to that, in my head at least. So that process continued moving forward over a period of years, and then the last maybe 18 months or so, accelerated quite a bit. I think me, Mike and Joe got a lot more intentional: “If this is ever going to have a chance to do anything, then let’s be intentional of spending time together. Let’s see what we come up with,” rather than spending a month doing stuff and then not doing stuff for 10 or 11 months.Everybody’s always close, even if they’re not talking all the time. I don’t really pay attention to how often I’m talking to anybody in the band — it’s usually just like, “Oh, this thing came up and Dave will think it’s funny.” You just reach out to each other, just like anybody. But I do think at that point in 2019, it’s safe to say we were talking less. For me personally, between ’19, ’20 and ’21, I would float the idea of getting together, get together and it was fun, but there wasn’t any creative momentum. It was kind of start and stop. met Emily around 2019 — she came in, we worked together at my old studio. We worked together… how many days?And we played around with a couple ideas, but it was just meeting each other. Then at a later point, Em came in with the whole band for an afternoon and worked on something that day. And then it was… years ! I did a couple other songs and worked with some other people. It was almost like everyone was just exploring the idea of other things, what other things are out there. At some point, I realized that the other things that I was doing were not as exciting, not as fulfilling, as this. Getting back into the group — at first it was Dave and Joe, and then Brad came in too at some point, and we were starting to do sessions with other people, some of I had written with in the year or two before that, including Colin. And then we brought Emily in, but we did sessions with a lot of different people, and as we worked, things just came into focus, naturally. Even with Emily and Colin, we didn’t say, “Hey, come in, we’re doing Linkin Park sessions.” We just said, “We’re going to write songs.”I was really clear about not knowing, not calling it anything. That’s what me and Dave and Joe agreed we would say. We were telling ourselves, “We’re not calling this Linkin Park,” because, who knows?That was better — to see where it lands, instead of making it something and then having to fulfill that.It did all that, and those projects kept us engaged with each other in a lot of ways, even in the midst of the band not being active for years. You need to talk and figure out, what do we want to do, and how do we want to do it? Do we want to do theEmily and Colin are roughly 10 years younger than us — they’re this different generation, and what strikes me about that is that they’ve got a different perspective, with different ways of doing things, but they’re also old enough that they’ve got the experience. In Emily’s case, that’s particularly important. She’s been on the road and played a ton of shows, so when I was thinking about , I was like, “OK, we don’t have to worry.”song for me, and I was just like, “Holy s–t, that’s what I want to do. As a singer, I want to be able to scream.” That album was everything — I’ve listened to it a trillion times. I would skate to it. I would mosh to it.No, I didn’t scream at the time — but I just knew that’s what I was going to do. It took me time to develop it, but I learned by listening to singers. I didn’t have training and stuff, so was somebody that I knew — and I was obsessed. All I would listen to was that album. Emily, when you guys started working together, even before Linkin Park was part of the equation, what was it about Mike’s process that appealed to you?First off, it was very safe — and as an artist, if you feel safe, you’re going to get more out of the person, right? It’s a place where you can explore whatever it is that’s happening. “What do you want to talk about? What’s going on in your life?” It’s vulnerable, and that was key. And I just knew that process was fun, and it opened up a lot for me. That was the beginning — and then I had to wait a few years..) I literally said to her, “FYI, we move so slow. We move slowly normally, but right now, everything’s really slow. It’s going to be a long time before you hear from me, probably, so just please be patient with me.” I remember being like, “Please don’t assume that just because you haven’t heard from me in a while that I don’t think you’re great. I do think you’re great. This is our speed right now.”But once it picked up — once we were coming here , we were clear. I said, “We’re going to be there for this many weeks. You can come as often as you want, whatever you feel like you want to do.” And she said, immediately, “Is it OK if I come every day?” She cleared her schedule and showed up.It’s so fun to look at it from this vantage point now, but in the midst of it, we didn’t know where it was going. I sincerely didn’t know if it was going to be something completely different than Linkin Park or a new version of it. In my head, I would shut down when I started asking myself, “OK, well, if this is new stuff, then how do you play old stuff?” Mike was talking earlier about him doing music — I was the opposite. For a long time, I was like, “I don’t want to do any music. That hurts. I want to avoid that.” It took a while to get to a stage where I started feeling like this is actually energizing. And that was the shift for me, where it went from like, “Is it Linkin Park? Is it something else?” Emily feels like Linkin Park, Colin feels like Linkin Park. The six of us working together, figuring stuff out — that’s energizing, and I want to keep doing it. It was like filling a battery instead of draining it.What was happening with me, Dave, Joe and Brad as well — we were showing up, and they were the best versions of themselves that I’ve ever seen. Since 2017, I feel like everybody did some real reflection and some real work on themselves. And to use Joe as an example — he and I are more creative types and have a long history together, so we’re brothers like that, where we’ll just get under each other’s skin over very specific, usually creative things. And when we started hanging out again more frequently, in the process that turned into this record, I was like, “What the hell! That guy is awesome!” He was awesome before — we’d just pick on each other. And now I’m, like, inspired by Joe? I don’t even have words to explain what a good feeling that is, that a person that you’ve known for so long is now different in a way that feels like spending time together is more fun and productive. I just like it more. At what point in this gradual process did you guys go, “OK, this is Linkin Park, and these songs will be part of a Linkin Park album”?As the songs came into focus, the band’s DNA was really thick with this body of work. To call it anything else would be strange and misleading. We teach our kids that when you fall down, you have to get back up and you have to go try again, right? The idea of us doing some other thing, with this group of people and the sound of this music, feels like it would have been a resignation, in a way. I hate to say “cowardly,” but it would feel like hedging a bet. Really early on, I think I was just spitballing out loud, and I was like, “If we do some shows or something, maybe there’ll be a few people doing vocals.” Because we weren’t fully committed yet, and at that point, I didn’t want to put expectations super high on Emily. But it was a real thought: “Maybe it’s a bunch of people onstage.” And then Dave was one of the first people who was like, “I don’t want to half-ass anything. If we’re going to do something, let’s do it bold. If people don’t like it, so what? As long as we like it, and we’re confident, then let’s be bold with it!” So that’s what we’ve done, and that’s part of why I felt so empowered when we were making the record — to be like, “This is a Linkin Park song.”I also don’t want it to come across that I ever would think that Emily and Colin would automatically be in! From our side, it’s not an automatic yes — Emily has a ton of stuff going on, and same with Colin, who was having a ton of success writing and producing. Like, “Hey, Colin. Do you want to come drum on tour and leave everything else you’ve been working on?”The guys and I thought we should ask Emily and get a serious temperature check — this was around this time last year. She was going to go on vacation for a week coming up, so we were like, “We should ask her before, so when she goes on that trip, she’s going to have some open time to think about it, and if it’s a bad fit for her, she’s going to know.” Later, Emily told us that we played it too cool.They’re like, “Hey, um, just a couple questions.” And we were recording at the time. “Hey, so, you know, we got some shows coming up, and some big festival stuff. And, you know, it’s a year out, and we think that you’d be great. We think you could sing all the old songs, and we love what you do and what’s happening with this whole process…” I’m just like, “Cool, coo coo coo cool!” I had already talked to the people around me, and Dead Sara, who were like, “Absolutely. If they ask, it’s a no-brainer.” I’d already put my feelers out just to make sure, and they were putting their feelers out on me. It was like Melissa McCarthy in: “That’s why you don’t feed stray cats!” I had just kept showing up; I was the stray cat. But that was the moment. So then imagine hearing that, and then you have to nonchalantly waltz back into the studio, and they’re like, “OK, Emily, let’s think of another line, we’re working on the verse!” I can’t f–king think of anything else, and I have to pretend that I’m not . I’m there for another few hours, and I’m just trying to play it cool, because they played it so cool. But there’s f–king no way you can process it. I remember we were there late that night, and afterward I was panicking in the best way: “Is it real?” For three days at least, I don’t ever remember touching the ground. And then everything was different when I came back down — knowing my life was going to be different, in the best way. I came back to a dreamland. Once that reality sunk in, was there a sense of pressure? At that point, you knew that you were going to be singing Chester’s parts on these huge songs, taking over for this iconic voice.There is so much to this band — this is a very, very important band to this world. And the integrity of the band was really helpful in keeping me grounded. There were so many of those moments where it was like, “Holy s–t,” when you talk about the size of the shows, stuff like that. I’m on cloud nine, but then it hits you that there’s a lot of work to be done. And going into these songs, by a singular voice that’s beloved by so many people — it’s like, “How do I be myself in this, but also carry on the emotion and what he brought in this band?” That was the work that I had to do. The feeling, the energy, was already there as we were doing the album, so it’s just incorporating that feeling. to identify what the song meant to me as a singer, not just as someone listening to it. You got to marry the technical part and the emotion. It’s Chester’s voice, and it’s mine, but I want it to still feel the way I feel when I listen to the song, because that’s what the fans love. There is a passion to it that I’m hoping I can fill. You also couldn’t tell anyone you were a member of Linkin Park — and this was around a year ago. Why prepare all this under cover of darkness?I love surprises. I love to plan a surprise. So when it comes to this month, the party is ready, the streamers are on the wall, and we just need to invite the guests over. Once we decided to move to WME — and we had avoided a large agency for pretty much our entire career, but it felt like the best fit — we had to work out a way to do that, not only without making an announcement, but trying to keep the word as quiet as possible, so that we didn’t haveand whoever else saying, “Hey, Linkin Park just switched agencies! Something must be f–king happening!” And they were really good partners in that sense — getting such a huge company to also not tell everybody. I was nervous about that, and it worked out. I wasn’t worried about people in music finding out — I was worried about our fans hearing it and saying, “What does this mean?” and starting to create narratives.Rob had said to us at a point, I guess it was a few years ago now, that he wanted to put some distance between himself and the band. And we understood that — it was already apparent. He was starting to just show up less, be in less contact, and I know the fans noticed it too. Therelease, he didn’t show up for anything. So for me, as a friend, that was sad, but at the same time, I want him to do whatever makes him happy, and obviously everybody wishes him the best. I had done sessions with Colin — I met him around 2021, when I got an invite to a session with a couple of different writers, and Colin was one of the guys in the room, and I immediately clicked with him. He’s playing drums in the live show, and drums are his first instrument, but he plays guitar and bass and keyboard, and he produces and mixes. We have a similar way of looking at music, of starting from scratch, and I really enjoyed working with him and bouncing ideas back-and-forth. I don’t know if any of these songs are going to be released, but we had done something with grandson, Bea Miller, Sueco — just getting in the room together to make stuff. And then when Linkin Park started making stuff, for whatever we were going to do, it was just like, “Oh, Colin. We’re making stuff. You should come over.” Mike and Dave, what was it about Emily that just worked in this template, in terms of her voice, ideas and approach?Going back to 2017 or 2018, I was familiar with Emily’s voice from Dead Sara, and I just loved it — you have that relationship immediately with the vocalist of a band where it just hits you. And then as we got to work with Emily more, it wasn’t just the fact that she’s supertalented vocally, or that she’s a great person who I love hanging out with — when she sings, I connect with it. For me, that’s what’s always felt like Linkin Park: being able to connect with what Mike’s doing, what Chester was doing, on an emotional level, and be able to absorb that and feel that for myself. As we worked more, and as we got to see what Emily was capable of and the different things that she could bring to the music, it just felt like such a natural, easy, powerful fit. It’s hard to describe, other than just that sense of “This works.”I’ve always been the vocal producer, and I’m always there for the recording of all the vocals. With Chester, he was the type of vocalist who, like most really good vocalists, could imitate lots of other people. You could say Dave Gahan from Depeche Mode, you could say Perry Farrell , you could say Scott Weiland , and he could push in that direction very accurately. So when we were working together, I knew all of those levers to pull, and I could say, “Hey, you’re singing it a little like that person. Can you please try and sing it like this person?” And then with Emily, in the beginning especially, I’m like, “OK, I don’t know your voice super well. I don’t know you super well and what you like.” Do you remember when I came in here with the… I can see her face, the country artist…Yes! I was driving here to EastWest, and it occurred to me that Emily has a texture of her voice that could go in a Bonnie Raitt direction. And I ran in, and I go, “Do you like Bonnie Raitt?” She’s like, “Yeah, I love Bonnie Raitt.” We got into what Bonnie Raitt songs you knew and you liked, and you sang along with those to get in the mood. And then we sang our song with that texture. And I was like, “OK, that’s a thing I need to know. You can sing that way. That’s really f–king useful.” For example, I now know to say, “Em, we’re going Feral Cat Mode.” And she knows what that sounds like! We’ve got shorthand now!God, I can’t wait. I’m at that point where I’m like, “OK, we’ve done this enough. I’m ready.”I think you are. It’s funny, because we’ve been rehearsing with basically just the road crew, and then the other day, we had some of families visit, came over with the kids. And they were in the room, and you turned it up. You went 95% show mode. And I was like, “If that’s what happens when you put 10 people in a room, I can’t wait until we have a lot more people in the room.” As we were working out the songs, we had to pitch some stuff, to change the key so that it’s in Emily’s target register. We had to relearn songs that we’ve been playing live for 20 years in order to do that, and it’s such a mindf–k! With every album we’ve put out since our first record, there were expectations. There are no expectations on the first record, and the second record on, there are always expectations, and we’ve always been realistic about those. We know that there will always be a wide variety of opinions and reactions, but when we release something, it’s because it’s ready to be released, we’re proud of it, we’re happy with where we’re at, and we feel like it’s the best snapshot of the band in the current moment. And as the reactions come in, our door just stays open, because as a music listener, sometimes I hear things and go, “That’s terrible,” and the next thing I know, I keep coming back to it and I love it. Are you playing it by ear after this album and tour, or are you already thinking about new songs and creative projects? How are you thinking long term?I think everybody might have a different answer. I’ve just been in this mode of not getting ahead of myself. I’m so good at living in tomorrow — I excel at that. I’ve been intentional as much as possible about taking one step at a time with what we’re doing with the band. And having said that, if it continues as it already feels and is going, I’ve got endless energy to put back into it. I’m sure we’re going to do some hard touring in 2025, and I’m sure that we’ll want to catch our breath, take a second, regroup, reflect. But if it keeps going as it has, I’d be very excited to reinvest and see what our next steps are.It feels like we got into such a good rhythm toward the end of the album. I feel like there’s more, and that it’d be cool to continue. And also, getting to play live, you get to see a lot more, obviously, but I learn a lot on the road, especially with a band.Yeah, that’s a great point — the learning on the road part, because you get the reactions to the songs and can go, “Oh, these things work really well live.” And as we were going back through the record today, I was thinking about how we learned about your voice and how it works, and how you work. And I think there’s lots of untapped stuff that I haven’t tried, and I always love that. Of all the albums that we’ve made, each time I go into it looking for what we haven’t done, what stone we can turn over. Sometimes it’s just stuff that I’m curious about, and other times it’s stuff that somebody else in the band is just obsessed with. So we’ll see what happens, after we get through this next chapter and go back in to make something new.
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