I’m not gonna even hold y’all — the new Linkin Park single is a banger, so just go on ahead and watch the video.
Chester Bennington is easily in my top 20 vocalists of all time. If a singer is going to capture my attention, they have to stand out in one of three areas:
- conveying emotion with your voice
- something special or unique about your tone, delivery, or technique
- an impressive display of range, power, or control
Whitney Houston, Kelly Clarkson, Luther Vandross, Jazmine Sullivan — these are all singers who tic all of those boxes. Chester Bennington was one too. What really impressed me as Linkin Park went on was his ability to maintain that level of performance with technique that felt all wrong to me. How are you yelling at the mic, track after track, album after album, performance after performance, and not destroying your voice? There are very few singers I can’t really sing along to, but Chester was at the top of that list. I do a great Toni Braxton impression. Whitney is right in my range if I sing an octave lower. I love to harmonize with Brandy. I cannot holler along to Chester Bennington.
Aside from Chester though, the sound of Linkin Park itself pulled me in a way that rap-rock had never done before. I liked rap music and I liked rock music, but most of the acts that combined the two did it in a way that either felt forced, felt like a substitute for a singer who has no sense of melody, or felt more like rapid-fire singing. I remember hearing Faith No More “Epic” at the bowling alley growing up, but it was just the Beastie Boys with more guitars. Rage Against the Machine was very cool to me, but it didn’t feel like hip-hop. Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock where white trash joke acts where I came from and CrazyTown was just Red Hot Chili Peppers without any star power.
It wasn’t until Linkin Park that rap-rock felt cool to me. They felt like the first band where the members genuinely grew up on rap and rock, and it caught me off guard! Mike Shinoda had a few spoken lines on “One Step Closer” and “Crawling,” but when they dropped “In The End” and he was legitmately spitting bars? I sat up! That’s when I went to buy Hybrid Theory and I fell into Linkin Park so hard that when Meteora dropped, I waited outside of Best Buy for the store to open so I could get a copy on release day.
Chester had his struggles and ultimately checked out in 2017, which I don’t need to re-hash here, but it’s always difficult when a band whose sound is very identifiable by their lead singer decides to keep pushing after the lead passes away. I never expected a new singer to step into Chester Bennington’s shoes, but they have found Emily Armstrong of Dead Sara.
Dead Sara’s first album is the only one that crossed my path because I used to watch Jimmy Kimmel pretty much every night when I couldn’t afford cable back in the day and it was always notable when somebody came on and rocked hell hard on late night television.
Listening to the new Linkin Park and listening to this old performance from 12 years ago, Emily has retained a lot of that same energy from Dead Sara but smoothing out the edges a bit for Linkin Park. She doesn’t sound like she’s doing a Chester Bennington impression, because that grit is part of her natural delivery, and that’s probably why the band reached out to her. She’s sitting in this sweet spot right between Chester and Brody Dalle from the Distillers and I feel like she’ll do the rest of the Linkin Park catalogue justice in the live shows.
The new album comes out in November, and I think this single is an amazing start. Leading the song off with Mike Shinoda was a smart choice, because even though I don’t really need to ever hear him sing, the familiarity of his voice first serves to ground the single firmly into a place the fans already know. It feels like the same band with the same energy, but it also feels like a new band who isn’t trying to replace Chester so much as continue on as a new thing.
I won’t be waiting in line outside of Best Buy this time (do they even sell CDs anymore?) but I’m here for it all the same.
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