Linkin Park - The Hunting Party

I am sure I am not the first person (nor the last) to say that the past few Linkin Park albums have been a DUD.  As much as I am a fan of bands trying to incorporate new sounds and taking wisdom from their youth, a band's core sound is a main focus of why you became a fan in the first place.  So when Linkin Park decided to make the move towards electronic beats and heavy drums in albums such as "A Thousand Suns" and "Living Things", much like a relationship, I lost the spark that connected me to their music.  I didn't hear the crunching distortion blended with drum and synth that I was used to hearing.  I know they gained a lot of new fans along the way, so I remained humble and kept listening to "Meteora" and "Hybrid Theory".

Even though it's a cover (originally composed by Nine Inch Nails), look how aggressive these guys looked ten years ago!



So knowing that Linkin Park were working on a follow up to "Living Things", I expected a further shift into the EDM-ish style they have been producing these past few years.  However, Mike Shinoda surprised me, as well as many others I'm sure with this interview answer...

"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." -Mike Shinoda

That was all I needed to hook me back into the fold.  Then little by little the information surrounding the new album came out.  Album artwork and track listing are listed below for LP's sixth full length album "The Hunting Party".  It will be released on June 17th, 2014 via Warner Bros Records.  The album was recorded at Larrabee Sound Studios/EastWest Studios (Los Angeles) between May, 2013 and April, 2014.  The production was taken care in-house by Brad Delson and Mike Shinoda.

1. Keys To The Kindgom
2. All For Nothing (feat. Page Hamilton of Helmet)
3. Guilty All The Same (feat. Rakim)
4. The Summoning
5. War
6. Wastelands
7. Until It’s Gone
8. Rebellion (feat. Daron Malakian of System Of A Down)
9. Mark The Graves
10. Drawbar (feat. Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine)
11. Final Masquerade
12. A Line In The Sand

"We like to add a little darkness to it, but we've been known to write poppy songs. And we were heading in a direction that was more like that. And at some point Mike was listening to it, and some other bands, and realised he was kind of writing songs that harkened to the stuff he was listening to, and came to the realisation like, "This is not what I want to do." There is so much of this right now, all we are going to be doing is just adding more noise to the noise. And that sucks. And so we threw out all of those songs, and I think he played it to me first, and he said, "I am going to play this for the guys, but this is kind of where I want to go: Let me know if it's too crazy." So that was when he played me the beginnings of what turned into 'Guilty All The Same'. And I was like "Ah, f**k yeah let's do that, all day, every day, on every single song!"-Chester Bennington



Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe this marks the first time in their career where they have featured musicians collaborating with them on their tracks.  I am very excited to hear them as Tom Morello, Daron Malakian, and Page Hamilton are all very respected musicians who will add some great variety to the album.

"We were working on a bunch of songs, for a long time, and we had all been writing demos for about six months, before we started working on songs specifically for the record. We always write. So, Mike [Shinoda] had been working on quite possibly - most definitely - the most together batch of songs. Mike typically is the creative general of the band anyway. So we were writing stuff that was really in line with a lot of the stuff that's going on right now. We're listening to a lot of alternative, indie rock right now, and we like a lot of it. And we like writing poppy music too, you know." -Chester Bennington



So why the change back to roots all of a sudden?  Like most people in life, sometimes a moment of clarity is all that is needed.  For Mike Shinoda, that clarity was realizing that he was emulating music he enjoyed listening to rather than making music for himself.

"There was a point last year where I was making stuff and I realized that it was just wrong.  I was making stuff that I wanted to listen to, not something I wanted to be making." -Shinoda

Makes sense.  All big name artists can go through this change.  Machine Head, Metallica, Megadeth, Rob Zombie, Mastodon, Slipknot, and many others have veered away from their core sound in favour of something a little more diverse.  I guess it is a hit and miss type of risk artists have to take to see what their creative capabilities are.

“With Page and Daron and Tom, we sat and talked to each of them about their process and our process. Everybody writes songs differently, and I think fans would be surprised at how different it can be. With Morello, we just got together and jammed. We’re so far from a jam band, and that’s all he does, as far as writing. Rage Against the Machine wrote their songs by jamming them out; we write our songs on the computer, and then learn them after we’ve written what to play. But we got together with him and jammed, and that little interlude, that instrumental, was the best thing we made together. It didn’t end up being a song—we tried putting some vocals on it, but it just didn’t feel like that.” -Shinoda

So the most informative thing I have read about this new album is some of the track breakdowns.  While YouTube is doing a great job keeping track from leaking online (such as "Until It's Gone"), Loudwire got the opportunity to break down some of the tracks and describe the overall tone the song sets on the album.

‘Keys to the Kingdom’: Right off the bat this track has an old-school punk vibe with a new twist. The hasty drums and explosive riffs  a hardcore element to it. Vocalist Chester Bennington unleashes melodies and the balance of Shinoda’s rap verses makes for a powerful combination. Although the band will be playing arenas on their forthcoming Carnivores tour, this song has an underground feel that would welcome them to a small, beat up venue in Brooklyn, N.Y.

‘Wastelands of Today’: This tune starts with a hip-hop verse and the song has a lot of groove with heavy drum and bass. The chorus is catchy yet sludgy and has some grit to it. Watch out for the heavy breakdown in the middle of the song. Linkin Park take you on a sonic roller-coaster ride as they play around with the tempo and ambiance of the song.

‘Until It’s Gone’:  It’s a more mid-tempo track with softer lyrics provided by Chester Bennington, who really shows his vocal versatility. The dreamy and atmospheric sounds are enough to whisk you away but Bennington brings you back down to earth as he belts out their take on a familiar chorus: “’Cause you don’t know what you’ve got / No you don’t know what you’ve got / You don’t know what you’ve got / Until it’s gone.” This catchy song is one that’s bound to get stuck in your head for a long time.

‘All for Nothing’: This one, when performed live, will get the crowd moving for sure. With a hip-hop flow in the first verse this quickly turns into almost a punk anthem. The song is relentless and unapologetic, with a stellar guitar solo by Brad Delson. It’s no surprise that this heavy tune is hardcore especially since it features a guest spot Helmet vocalist and guitarist Paige Hamilton.

“That’s Page singing—there’s a double of me in there, but that’s him way up front. We hung out with him over the course of a day or two, and went back and forth over the song. It was just as much about meeting the guy and picking his brain and hearing cool stories about things that he’s done. But the other thing was, I really wanted him to know that this was a song we wouldn’t have made if I’d never listened to Helmet—you know, ‘It’s because of you that we wrote this. If you don’t want to sing on it, that’s OK, but we wanted to play it for you first. And if you want to be on the song, then you can be on the song.’ He liked it so much that he wound up singing on it, and he added some cool layers and chords on guitar.” -Shinoda

‘Rebellion’: With a name like ‘Rebellion,’ as a listener you would expect pure chaos and mayhem and that’s exactly what Linkin Park give you. The vibe is almost thrashy with its speedy riffs and galloping drums. While listening to it one might think that it could even fit on System of a Down’s first album — that’s probably because none other than Daron Malakian of System of a Down is featured on this song.

“Daron came in, and we tried having him play over a couple of existing things. It wasn’t vibing at first, but Daron’s such a great songwriter, that having him play over an existing track wasn’t my first choice, anyway. I said, ‘Maybe if you come in with some stuff, we can work it out together.’ And he came in with these great riffs that made the song–that’s what we built it around. As he was doing it, I was laying out the drums on the keyboard, like I like to do, and his mind was just blown. He was like, ‘Oh my god, they sound real! Dude, that would have taken us days to get that done—and you did it in 15 minutes!’ So he was showing us a bit of his world, I was showing him some of our world–it was really collaborative.” -Shinoda