Review Summary: A band who used to be the voice of a generation, creating music with absolutely nothing to say.
For as long as I can remember, Linkin Park have been one of my favourite bands – for reasons that, I must admit, have long since failed to correlate with the perceived (and actual) quality of their music.
Hybrid Theory and
Meteora were the golden age find of my teenage years, two albums that would come to significantly shape the genre(s) of music I grew to love and adore throughout adulthood.
Minutes to Midnight was my first true encounter with the idea that a band I’ve become accustomed to stylistically could change or evolve, with admittedly some rather varied results.
A Thousand Suns was the album that truly made me appreciate the band as a group of musicians and composers, a collective of friends who grew tired of their roots and looked to create something that shed the boundaries of a sound they had long since sought to leave behind.
And then came
Living Things, and the cracks really began to show.
While neither album was particularly terrible (on the contrary, I rather enjoy both when the mood inclines),
Living Things and
The Hunting Party are representative of a problem, and it’s a simple one: the band that used to be the voice of a generation, after releasing a concept album that truly threatened to surpass anything that had come before it in regard to its composition, maturity, lyrical content and thematic direction, was very clearly running out of things to say.
Living Things, while largely appearing to be a Frankensteined crossbreed of ‘
A Thousand Suns meets
Hybrid Theory’ on the surface, was something of a mess. Neither the instrumentation nor the lyrical side of things was all that particularly interesting, with only a few scattered ideas baring any worthwhile results. It’s a passable electronic rock effort, but the album didn’t really offer any notable progression for the band’s identity. It’s also here that Linkin Park would come to massively rely on an overuse of uninspired octaves whenever guitars were involved, an issue that would repeatedly come back to haunt them in the years to follow.
The Hunting Party, on the other hand, was an appreciatively energetic rock effort with some legitimately entertaining results. But, upon repeated listens, it becomes increasingly more apparent that the band was casting a progressively wider net, frantically searching for anything of substance lyrically or instrumentally… and coming up mostly short in both departments.
The Hunting Party has some fun moments, with the drums and some of the guitarwork being mostly entertaining (the largely unsung talents of Rob Bourdon are most definitely the star here), but it never truly reaches any further than merely being a passable alternative rock album.
And then came
One More Light… and the band’s frustration with their own lack of progression became blindly obvious.
Regardless of what your opinion may be regarding what
One More Light signifies for the band’s career, both before or after Chester Bennington’s fateful decision, the album represents the pinnacle of Linkin Park’s creative desperation:
Hybrid Theory had been the nostalgic classic that propelled the band to stratospheric heights,
A Thousand Suns had been the career defining reinvention in which the band legitimately poured every viable ounce of inspiration and determination into creating something special, and nothing that came after would even come close to offering the same level of creative reward. After
Living Things and
The Hunting Party, the only thing left to do was to throw everything out the window and create something so drastically different that it could never be compared to anything that came before it, and that’s exactly what happened with
One More Light; a ‘throw-the-spaghetti-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks’ attempt to make a pop record with heart, abandoning the apparent restrictions of rock to instead opt for a softer, more emotive sound – something that (they claimed, at least) spoke to them creatively on a level that neither
Living Things nor
The Hunting Party had.
So, it must have really stung when everyone fucking hated it.
Even now, writing this paragraph seven years later, it has to be acknowledged that Chester Bennington’s death was the shared tragedy of an entire generation, and it seemed to many that the only true reason the band might return would be if they legitimately had something new to say. For a large portion of the band’s longstanding fanbase, Linkin Park was (in many ways) better off left in the past; a precious gemstone of teenage nostalgia that gradually waned as the years went by, before being tragically concluded with the death of one of modern rocks most iconic voices. Should they ever decide to return, the band who used to be the voice of a generation was going to be in desperate need of a reinvented identity if they were to ever justify the potential risk of tarnishing Chester Bennington’s legacy. Even after announcing their comeback on September 5th, 2024 with a relatively well intentioned live performance and a brand new vocalist, it was hard to shake the feeling that this could either go really well… or very poorly. Was that really a risk worth taking?
Well, after hearing the newest iteration of a band I have loved throughout most of my life, and repeatedly spinning the album in the hopes that some small part of me would extend that love just a little bit further… I have to admit that my thirty-something-year-old brain has finally grown tired of playing the endlessly tolerant defender. So, let me pose a simple question to you; after seven long years of waiting, following the loss of one of modern rocks most iconic voices, is this new album worth it?
No.
For starters, let’s get the obvious scapegoat out of the way; for all the controversy surrounding Linkin Park’s newly recruited frontwoman, the faults of this album are rooted far deeper than its chosen lead vocalist. Emily Armstrong, to her absolute credit, is giving this album everything she can. The screams are in abundance, her energy throughout the album is apparent, and Armstrong’s husky cleans offer a fresh lick of paint to dissuade any potential ‘Chester wannabe’ comments. She’s a capable vocalist that fits the bill where required, and the sheer mountainous pressure in stepping into Bennington’s shoes must have felt insurmountable even at the best of times. Where
From Zero struggles is instead more so in regards to its overall material. There’s something to be said for the creation of an album that wants to ‘pay tribute’ to everything a band has released previously, however – when you have seven different albums with some vastly different stylistic direction – this can result in something of a very mixed bag. With this in mind, the primary issue with
From Zero is relatively straightforward, and it’s a real shame that the band didn’t foresee it: in attempting to cover too many bases, the album is a maddeningly inconsistent effort, with some decent positives and some glaring negatives.
‘Two Faced’, for example, offers something that fans have been desperately pining for since the glory days of
Meteora; a brand-new Linkin Park track so blatantly rooted in the nu metal direction of
Hybrid Theory that it could have been scooped up and repackaged from an early 2000s demo session and fans wouldn’t have been any wiser. Instrumentally, the track features what easily stands as one of Brad Delson’s best riffs of the last twenty years, with the newly recruited Colin Brittain’s drumwork being absolutely laced with classic early 2000s rap rock groove and Joe Hahn’s DJ scratching solo throughout the bridge offering a massive highlight. As for our vocalists, Emily Armstrong’s screams are tremendous throughout the track, with Mike Shinoda delivering his signature flow of
Hybrid Theory-era rapping that slips back on as easily as if he never discarded it for loftier vocal ambitions.
Elsewhere, secondary single ‘Heavy Is The Crown’ effectively stands as a fusion of
Meteora’s ‘Faint’ and
Minutes to Midnight’s ‘Given Up’ – complete with glitchy synths and a fifteen-second scream from Emily Armstrong that couldn’t have been more of a “hey, remember when Chester did this?” moment if it tried. It’s a decent enough stab at nostalgia, but the octave-laden guitarwork is astoundingly generic for a band who were once known for catchy (albeit simple) guitar riffs that had a keen habit of getting stuck in your head, and the entirely forgettable lyrics are just that – forgettable. No more, no less.
In fact, as we’re already on the topic, it’s the heaviest cuts of the album that often prove to be the greatest offenders. ‘The Emptiness Machine’ is about as run-of-the-mill a radio rock track as it gets, ‘Cut the Bridge’ lazily drifts by hoping that you’ll remember the greener pastures of ‘Bleed it Out’ but holds absolutely no sticking power, and ‘Casualty’ takes a wild swing at being the ‘War’/’Victimised’ punk-infused track of the album. At first, the idea of ‘Casualty’ sounded interesting when previously teased, but the blatantly desperate attempt at delivering something heavy comes across as entirely too forced, with the lyrics being nothing short of a cliché: “let me out, set me free. I know all the secrets you keep. I won’t be your casualty.” Combine the lacklustre lyrical direction with the awfully mixed vocals and an utterly soulless instrumental, it all results in an effort so melodramatically toothless that you can’t help but wonder why the track was even considered for release in the first place.
And, sadly, the criticism can just keep on rearing its miserable head.
Dipping into more electronic territory, the
One More Light-inspired ‘Over Each Other’ stands as a passable pop rock track with a nice enough sentiment, but the track sorely lacks emotional weight due to a lack of any particularly interesting instrumentation or even a single melody worth remembering. Elsewhere,
A Thousand Suns-influenced track ‘Overflow’ is entirely forgettable until the final forty-five seconds, where a legitimately interesting addition of gnarly synths suddenly enters the fray. It would be a solid moment of genuine momentum, if it wasn’t for the fact that the track ends so abruptly it completely squanders what little interest it briefly generates. Closing the album, another
One More Light-inspired track is presented in the form of ‘Good Things Go’, which – while offering some pleasant guitarwork that easily delivers some of the album's most melodic instrumentation – quickly devolves into the kind of uninspired late 2010s Twenty One Pilots-esque radio rock that drew so much derision when the band originally released
One More Light in 2017.
If truth be told, upon coming to the decision to pen this review, the phrase ‘nail in the coffin’ has kept ping-ponging around in my head. The return of Linkin Park had been a moment of genuine catharsis for me, a day that I often doubted would ever come… but, now that this moment
has come, it feels like an utterly squandered opportunity for one of the most recognisable names in modern rock to deliver a comeback album worthy of their name. ‘Stained’ might feature some neat ‘Skin To Bone’/’Until It Breaks’
Living Things-era electronics, and ‘IGYEIH’ certainly hints at future potential for the band’s stylistic direction, but if there is one definitive word that describes
From Zero, it’s ‘forgettable’. This album, above all else, feels like a nail in the coffin; a final whimper of lacklustre material, plagued with underwhelming lyrical content, a claustrophobic mix that suffocates at every opportunity, and by-the-numbers instrumentation that feels hauntingly uninspired for a band who once showed some incredible promise.
I hate to say it, but it’s no longer possible to deny what Linkin Park have become; a band who used to be the voice of a generation, creating music with absolutely nothing to say.
