In a new interview with BBC Radio 1’s New Music Show With Jack Saunders, Mike Shinoda both chatted about the details of the album and their new chapter with Emily Armstrong.
“The album comes out the second week of November,” he said. “And I hope that when people hear it, they really understand this is not meant to be a redo or a rewrite of Linkin Park. This is intended to be the new chapter of Linkin Park. It’s, like, the old chapter was a great chapter and we love that chapter. And that ran its course.”
He explained the challenges the band faced since they got a new singer. “And now we were faced with the challenge of, ‘Okay, if you start from scratch with another voice, what do you do?’ And Emily’s voice, like when she sings the thing, man, it’s like the passion… She’s a hundred percent her. That’s the best part, is she’s not trying to be Chester, she’s not trying to be anybody else. She’s her, and that’s why it works.”
Since her joining the band, Armstrong didn’t just receive backlash from fans, but both from the late singer’s mother and son too. Although Shinoda had no intention of bringing Linkin Park back after the passing of the late frontman, Jaime Bennington thinks Shinoda secretly ran the band undercover for years.
“The band is not Mike Shinoda’s band. Fort Minor, ‘The Rising Tied,’ ‘Post Traumatic,’ those are Mike’s solo projects,” he explained. “I’ve antagonistically claimed that ‘Post Traumatic’ is actually a Linkin Park album and that they’ve never stopped Linkin Park — it’s just been undercover for multiple years experimenting with their process and on their audience using techniques that I believe are grooming techniques. I’ve spoken at length about in my Euphoria and ‘Post Traumatic’ highlights on my Instagram but also in my YouTube live streams.”
Jaime has made many claims about Mike Shinoda and Linkin Park ever since the band decided to keep on touring and making new music with their new singer Emily Armstrong. He claimed that Shinoda tried to erase his father’s history from the band ‘during international suicide prevention month.’ Shinoda subtly responded to the comments in a show later. “It is not about erasing the past – it is about starting this new chapter into the future, and coming out here for each and every one of you,” he said.
Emily Armstrong gave her first performance with the band three weeks ago in a live-streamed private show. Armstrong got mixed reviews from fans, but she mostly received positive feedback from rockers and even from Bennington’s widow Talinda Bennington.
Linkin Park recently released a new song called ‘Heavy Is The Crown,’ and fans think it resembles to the band’s earlier sound.