Los Angeles' Linkin Park, fronted by singer and angry white boy Chester Bennington and rapper Mike Shinoda (who had already tried something similar in a band called Xero), were the most commercially successful band of the
rap-metal genre launched by
Rage Against The Machine.
Their debut album
Hybrid Theory (2000) was a textbook in how to turn teenage angst into the
musical equivalent of fast food.
At the same time catchy and vicious, the songs mix
metal riffs and syncopated rhythms.
The first four songs are emblematic of the (limited) variations of the songs:
the seismic distorted emocore of Papercut sets the mood,
the heavier riffs coupled with a more melodic singalong in One Step Closer push the atmosphere towards melodrama, the turntable cacophony and rapping hijack the anger of With You,
and the screamed Nirvana-esque refrain of Points Of Authority turns their
music into the sound of self-flagellation.
They tame their fury with the power-ballad Crawling (the most played song of the album) and the shamefully poppy In The End.
They return to the "brutal melodrama" frame of mind with Runaway,
and A Place For My Head but nothing compares with the first four songs.
They manage to squeeze in the instrumental hip-hop piece Cure For The Itch which sounds completely out of context.
The singer screams his lungs out as if he were delivering
Nirvana's or
Nine Inch Nails' atomic bombs, but in reality
he is just toying with stereotypes.
They repeat ad nauseam the very same song structure: a little bit of noise,
then distorted guitar rifs, then angry vocals, then more riffs and then angry rapping, and a soaring refrain sustained by loud guitars.
The album went on to sell 24 million copies.
Reanimation (2002) is a remix album.
Meteora (2003) is not a remix album but feels like one, at least as far as the best songs go:
Don't Stay (anthemic emocore a` la One Step Closer),
Somewhere I Belong (not too dissimilar from In the End)
and
Numb (a power-ballad in the vein of Crawling).
If U2 had been around in 2007, they would probably
sound like
Minutes to Midnight (2007), which reduced the rapping and decreased the fury.
By the end of the decade, they had sold more than 50 million copies of their
albums.
Shinoda debuted solo with
The Rising Tied (2005) under the moniker Fort Minor.
Chester Benington formed
Dead By Sunrise and released
Out of Ashes (2009) in an emo-pop vein.
Despite the side-projects, Linkin Park scored again with
Iridescent (2011), that appeared in a movie soundtrack.
Far from simply repeating itself, the band completely changed course with
A Thousand Suns (2010), an unstable collection that toys with
(then fashionable) synth-pop (the single The Catalyst,
When They Come for Me) and even
acoustic folk (The Messenger), leaving little room for their trademark
rap-rock (Wretches and Kings).
Living Things (2012) contains at least
In My Remains and Castle of Glass to salvage.
They returned to metal with The Hunting Party (2014)
that contains
Guilty All the Same
and
Mark the Graves.
The only notable song on One More Light (2017) is the title-track, the rest is filler.
Chester Bennington committed suicide in 2017, two months after he had sung Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah at Chris Cornell's funeral.
Shinoda's solo album Post Traumatic (2018) was followed (during the covid pandemic) by three volumes of mostly instrumental pieces titled Dropped Frames (2020).
The band resurfaced with
From Zero (2024).
