Linkin Park’s Return Was Close to Perfect

Photo: James Minchin III

UPDATE: Emily Armstrong has addressed her past support of Danny Masterson, stating that she “misjudged him” and “hasn’t spoken with him since” the trial. She added, “To say it as clearly as possible: I do not condone abuse or violence against women, and I empathize with the victims of these crimes.”

When I spoke to Mike Shinoda last year, I came away with the impression that Linkin Park had entered the afterlife that massive rock bands traverse when the loss of a member binds surviving players and their audience in not just grief but a hungering nostalgia. Chester Bennington, who died at 41 in 2017, was a hall of fame rock screamer, a disarmingly tender singer, and an emotionally exacting writer. These are daunting shoes to fill. While I could have envisioned a bittersweet reunion engagement and a steady trickle of solid outtakes, I would never have bet on new music. That made yesterday’s announcement — via surprise livestream performance — that the band was returning with a new vocalist (longtime Dead Sara singer Emily Armstrong), drummer (Colin Brittain), and album (From Zero), a jolt. It was a welcome bit of clarity from a camp whose fandom has waited seven years for these players to realign.

There was a logic to revealing this news in the shock and awe of the band’s first live set since the somber Linkin Park and Friends: Celebrate Life in Honor of Chester Bennington event in 2017, when a deep roster of famous friends stood in for the late singer. On the livestream, there was no opportunity to wonder about Armstrong’s qualifications for the gig before seeing her step into it. It asked the audience to quickly restructure a sense of what Linkin Park can and should be. But for all the uncertainty that has been resolved, the reunion has raised a handful of prickly questions of its own, including concerns about Armstrong’s history with the Church of Scientology. Her hiring also runs counter to the history of storied rock bands onboarding a new vocalist. There was no audition process; writing new songs seemed to precede working out arrangements for the older ones.

The uncertainty about the future I could sense from Shinoda last year was a shrewd front. Linkin Park wasn’t just clearing vaults to keep the memories alive and the catalogue monetized, it was settling business in advance of an imminent reset. The April release of “Friendly Fire” — a sweetly exhausted leftover from One More Light, the final album with Bennington at the helm — on the Papercuts greatest-hits album feels like a line of demarcation now. The new single “The Emptiness Machine” restores the feeling by charging forward in a different direction from the last record and leaving listeners to fall in line or by the wayside.

It’s really a new era: There’s skate-punk heft where the last album delivered somber, divisive alt-pop. The vocal threatens to cut through the mix, tracing out minor-key melodies on the way to cathartic, screaming choruses. “Machine” says this journey is the essence of a Linkin Park song, and this crew can move forward in the lane paved for it by the reliably unpredictable body of past work in its rear view. This has always been a project about observing and subverting traditions — folding rap and dance music into rock and roll, bringing pop sensibilities to metal, blending anime and anomie.

The livestream suggested that this can work. Armstrong seemed a bit daunted early on as a few missed notes relayed the pressure of not just facing the fandom for the first time as Bennington’s successor but doing his material justice. (Shinoda told Zane Lowe that Armstrong’s scream appealed to him because it felt bit crushed in real life.) Like a guitar pedal or drum machine inspired by but interested in more than imitation of a beloved staple, Armstrong hits the necessary sweet spots — buttressing Shinoda’s “Lift me up, let me go” refrain from the breakdown of “The Catalyst” with arresting high notes, delivering on the nearly unwound “Shut up!” at the end of “One Step Closer” — while making room for her own intrigue. Her “What I’ve Done” is less forceful than the original, arriving at the chilling regrets of the chorus from a kind of resolute self-deprecation. Armstrong won’t be a Chester mimic, but there are points in her range that ring familiar. Her voice spans tender, angelic high notes and possessed growls, which suits a band itching to rekindle its musical fire while honoring its nü metal roots. Brittain’s beefy playing seems capable of pushing the band somewhere closer to the punk-metal pocket of 2014’s The Hunting Party but more likely to facilitate a tightening and toughening of the pop designs Light had.

Yet the care in making sure the reveal went off without a hitch makes the concerns about Armstrong’s associations outside of and prior to joining Linkin Park all the more puzzling. After the band’s announcement, At the Drive-in and the Mars Volta’s Cedric Bixler-Zavala blasted Emily Armstrong on Instagram, accusing her of involvement in the Church of Scientology and claiming she visited Danny Masterson’s preliminary rape hearing in support. The band hasn’t addressed the story yet in its full-court reunion press but they should, as some fans begin to worry that this celebration of the work of Chester Bennington, a childhood victim of sexual assault, is involving someone who has gone to bat for a convicted rapist. This new era of Linkin Park is barely a day old, and while we watch the gears of commerce creak into action around one of the best-selling musical acts of the millennium, it would be nice to see the same media savvy and forthrightness about this issue that we’ve gotten about the band’s upcoming tour dates.