56 KERRANG!
Just when you think you’ve got them figured out, another curveball:
LINKIN PARK return to riff-focused heaviness inspired by reflections
on their past – and the help of a few famous friends, too...
THE HUNTING
PARTY
2014
“
W
e like to throw people
through a loop when we
put a record out,” Chester
told Kerrang! with a glint
in his eye. “Once people
think they know what
we’re doing, we’ll do something that’s not
quite expected.”
Rarely have truer words been spoken. With
Minutes To Midnight, A Thousand Suns and
Living Things, Linkin Park had seemingly made
a concerted effort to escape the bonds of rock
and metal permanently. They’d flirted with it in
recent years, sure, but hadn’t dipped in more
than a toe for a sustained period in a very long
time. That had, of course, been exactly the
way they wanted it.
“We’ve existed in the alternative world
for a long time, very intentionally, and we
never really considered ourselves to be a
metal band,” was Chester’s appraisal, before
hammering the point home. “We always
thought there was more to us than that.“
But now Linkin Park had returned with a
vengeance, on a mission to rally against themainstream, specifically what they thought was
missing from it.
“Mike was like, ‘Ah, fuck that, what would
you think if we went this way?’” was Chester’s
recollection of the conversation in which the
two men discussed the dearth of guitar music
on the radio at that point, and the distinct lack
of bite from the stuff that did make it to the
airwaves. “In rock music right now, stuff is very
tame,” he elaborated. “It ranges from slow
tempo to mid-tempo. [There are] a lot of radio
jingle songs that sound like they belong on
Nickelodeon or Disney. I don’t dislike that stuff
when it’s well done, but there are times when
I want something else, and if I can’t find that
thing I want, I get frustrated.”
That frustration would lead Linkin Park to
make the music they’d long listened out for
but struggled to find, the kind of visceral, high-
energy stuff Mike had on his Spotify playlist,
‘Yelling over guitars’, featuring the likes of At
The Drive-In and Sick Of It All. Even the title
The Hunting Party was chosen to reflect this
search they were on and their desire to get
out of the bag of this particular sound.