It’s been more than seven years since Linkin Park’s former frontman, Chester Bennington, took his life. And while the band’s co-founder (as well as producer, co-lead singer and multi-instrumentalist) Mike Shinoda has talked about the future of Linkin Park for years, fans rightly wondered if the band would ever come back.
Now, it has, with the band’s release of From Zero, Linkin Park’s eighth studio album.
Linkin Park 1.0 was known, among other things, for Bennington’s searing, agonized vocals driving songs drenched with pain and alienation. His aching, raging articulation of loss connected with a generation of rock and metal fans in the early 2000s. And Bennington’s battles with his demons—sexual abuse as a child paired with alcohol and drug abuse later in his life—could not be salved by the worldwide acclaim his band achieved. In the end, he succumbed to a well-chronicled battle with depression and the temptation of ending it all.
Linkin Park didn’t end, as I noted. But it has changed. Not surprisingly, the group’s elevation of a new frontwoman, Emily Armstrong, hasn’t been without controversy on multiple levels.
For many, the idea that Bennington could ever be “replaced” was simply anathema. Another layer of controversy has swirled regarding the 38-year-old Armstrong’s alleged connections to Scientology and some of its most well-known practitioners.
Armstrong said of being brought into the fold of Linkin Park, “It was like I stepped into Disney World. It was like … full of magic and full of opportunity and everything you could possibly imagine.”
For anyone wondering if Linkin Park still has cultural resonance almost a decade after their last album was released, the charts seem to answer that question with a resounding yes. From Zero narrowly missed being the No. 1 album in the U.S. in the first week of its release, and still managed to top the charts in 10 other countries.
And while no one would likely ever confuse Armstrong’s voice with Bennington’s, there’s enough similarity vocally that by the second or third track on From Zero, I wasn’t even really thinking about it much differently than any other Linkin Park album. This 11-track effort clocks in at a brief 32 minutes, reviving the band’s signature fusion of rock and rap, screaming and synthesizing, emoting and, well, more emoting.
There’s a lot of hurt poured out on From Zero—just as we’ve witnessed on every other Linkin Park album. Amid that pain, we hear occasional moments of honest vulnerability and perspective on the hurt that’s been endured.
On album opener “The Emptiness Machine,” the lyrics deal with why someone keeps getting sucked back into an emotionally abusive relationship, even though she knows better. The reason she “gave up who I am for who you wanted me to be” is that “I only wanted to be a part of something.”
“Over Each Other” recognizes that a relationship is badly fractured because neither side ever listens to the other: “I can’t go to sleep/I lie awake at night/I’m so tired of talkin’/Over each other.”
“Casualty” could be heard as someone having enough self-respect to look for the escape hatch in an unhealthy relationship: “Let me out, set me free/ … I won’t be your casualty.” Similarly, “Two Faced” chronicles a lover’s realization of being played by a partner who will never take responsibility for anything.
“IGYEIH” stands for the chorus’ repeated line, “I gave you everything I have,” which—not surprisingly at this point—wasn’t enough.
The closest we come, I’d argue, to anything genuinely positive on the album comes in the last song, where we hear, “I asked for forgiveness a hundred times/Believed it myself when I halfway apologized.”
Much of what I included in the section above could also be seen as being problematic, too, as this album’s 11 songs plod through brokenness, anger, alienation and pain. There is, unfortunately, very little light here.
In terms of harsh content, the album’s lone profanity, an f-word, shows up in the first track, “The Emptiness Machine,” as someone bitterly realizes that hope for a good outcome is an act of futile (and profane) naiveté. We also hear lines that describe (probably metaphorically, though it’s not clear) submitting to the abuse of someone else: “I let you cut me open/Just to watch me bleed.”
That sense of being a victim of someone abuse and powerlessly submitting to it shows up repeatedly on From Zero. On “Cut the Bridge,” for instance, we hear about some who seems to take sadistic joy in hurting others by blowing up relationships: “Everything was perfect/Always made me nervous/Knowing you would burn it/Just to watch it burn/ … I was sitting on the dynamite for you to light the fuse.”
“Heavy Is the Crown” deals with yet another relationship going up in smoke: “Today’s gonna be the day you notice/ ‘Cause I’m tired of explaining what the joke is/ … Fire in the sunrise, ashes rainin’ down/Try to hold it in, but it keeps bleeding out.”
Most of the remaining tracks vent some combination of anger, disgust and rage, yet there seems to be little hope of avoiding relational obliteration. “Overflow,” for instance, delivers that message with a brutally nihilistic right hook: “Turning from a white sky/To a black hole/Turning from sunlight/To a shadow, oh/I know I can’t make it stop/I know I’m out of control/I keep filling it up/To overflow.”
It’s no mystery to me why Linkin Park went supernova near the end of 2000. Shinoda, Bennington and the rest of the band—like so many huge rock acts before them—gave primal voice to the disillusionment and alienation of youth. “I tried so hard and got so far/But in the end, it doesn’t even matter,” Bennington and Co. told us in 2001’s decade-defining hit “In the End.” For a generation of young metal fans, lyrics like those connected viscerally with their own brokenness, just as Nirvana’s music had done nearly a decade before. Nothing mattered, and truth was nowhere to be found. The only thing that felt real was pain—unending pain.
But what happens when all there is … is pain? How do you find the will and the hope to push forward, to persevere? Linkin Park boldly vented the pain of a generation, and it made them multiplatinum rock gods along the way. But even pop-culture deification wasn’t enough to stave off Bennington’s demons,.
I write all that because when we’re young—or younger—sometimes it can feel like pain and reality are indeed synonymous. And finding a band that puts words to our hurts can indeed offer a kind of catharsis—for a while. Those voices can give us the words and the sounds to express the anguish inside. I get that. I was that kid, and I’ve connected with plenty of songs and artists like that.
It takes time to see and learn that pain doesn’t always have the last word, that hope can emerge over time in ways that surprise us. But when that pain is magnified and reinforced so powerfully, for some the outcome is grim indeed—both for the artists themselves and for those who follow them.
What I was hoping for on this album was just a modicum of perspective from Linkin Park. I had hoped that seven-plus years after Bennington’s death, perhaps there would be a point of view bigger than never-ending pain and rage. I didn’t expect daisies and “Kum Ba Ya,” mind you. But some perspective that life doesn’t have to be as hopeless as it sometimes feels in the moment? That would have been gratifying.
But this feels like an album that Linkin Park could have made in 2004—which for some fans will be a feature, not a bug. For old fans and new, though, I’d hoped for a bit more, well, hope. Just a bit.
It’s not really there.
After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.
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