Mike Shinoda and Emily Armstrong knocking it out of the Park, with Alex Farrell and Joe Hahn backing them up.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: In 2024 Linkin Park, the very first band that my son and I ever had in common, released From Zero — their first new album in seven years, after lead singer Chester Bennington’s suicide. I wrote in part:
Mike Shinoda finally felt ready to record a revival with his bandmates, along with a new drummer (music-biz veteran Colin Brittain) and new co-vocalist Emily Armstrong, who reaches Bennington’s octave range (cf. her belt-sander’d screams in the needlessly acroynmized “IGYEIH”) and does her part for the legacy…the band dusts off their stacks and recaptures the first two albums’ nü-metal glory days with quiet-loud-quiet showcases like “The Emptiness Machine” and “Heavy is the Crown”, though their two favorite topics remain self-aware primal-scream sessions and tirades toward unnamed offenders who suck. With the band-reset button firmly pressed, the question of where LP goes from here — i.e, venturing into new ideas or rewriting the same single every few years, like Skillet — remains To Be Continued for now.
After recently wrapping up a two-year world tour, their story continues with Linkin Park: Unshatter, a documentary that’s been rolled out as a specialty theatrical release with limited showtimes and no AMC Premiere savings allowed. It isn’t a Behind the Music episode surveying their entire history for the uninitiated — more of a From Zero making-of, charting their gradual emergence from the throes of grief and rage to figure out what comes next. (Quoth the familiar lyric on the movie’s poster: “The hardest part of ending is starting again.”) At 54 it was my first time ever seeing a concert film in theaters, or anything like one because my favorite bands never make them.
