Linkin Park’s new album The Hunting Party comes out June 17th, followed by their tour with 30 Seconds to Mars. What we can expect is a heavier metal sound that pays homage to the aritsts that inspired nu-metal.
Mike Shinoda says on the direction of this album,
“We need to weed out a lot of the soft, emo kind of approach to our music, and we need to weed out anything that feels aggressive for aggressive’s sake. We’re not 18-year-old kids making a loud record – we’re 37-year-old adults making a loud record. And what makes a 37-year-old angry is different than what made us angry back in the day.”
Shinoda realizes that commercially, this direction might be challenging, but he believes in his music. Fed up with the indie music available now, he turned to the music that predated his band and inspired him to begin it. “I was thinking, what albums predated nü-metal,” he says. “Without these albums there wouldn’t have been Linkin Park.”
Not only did he draw inspiration from these bands, Refused, Helmet and At the Drive-In, to name a few, he invited them onto the new album. Page Hamilton, vocalist of Helmet appears on “All for Nothing,” System of a Down guitarist Daron Malakian provides some guest riffs on “Rebellion” and rap icon Rakim appears on “Guilty All the Same.” Shinoda discusses how the teaming up with Rakim occurred,
“I got on the phone with Rakim and explained our M.O. and told him how rock music has gone in this direction that we, at this moment, don’t feel comfortable following. He responded by telling me how his experience in hip-hop has been similar. Because rap music is so poppy, he can’t see himself making those kinds of records. It was at that moment, we realized we had a lot in common and I knew the song was gonna work.”
Shinoda notes that fans shouldn’t expect this to be the heaviest album of all-time of any band. This is just the heaviest and loudest Linkin Park album to date.
-Brittney Borruso www.facebook.com/rockstella
[via Rolling Stone]