Chester says he and his bandmates are continuing to push themselves creatively.
They’ll release new album One More Light on May 19, with the tracks Heavy and Battle Symphony splitting fans’ opinions on the band’s musical direction.
But Bennington says that genre doesn’t matter when it comes to their material and as long as they are being true to themselves, they can move forward with confidence.
He tells RockSound: “Starting from 2007 album Minutes To Midnighton, it’s like, ‘Let’s take some fucking risks.’ If the songs are great, that should be all that matters.
“We feel like we’re pushing ourselves creatively. If we write a bunch of pop songs that suck, we’ve definitely taken a wrong turn. If we write a bunch of metal songs that suck, we’ve taken a wrong turn.
"It doesn’t matter what style we write in – as long as it comes from a pure place and it’s something that we pour our hearts and souls into, we can deal with what happens from that point forward.”
Bennington continues: “Sometimes for us it was like, ‘We know we’re going to make a lot of people go, ‘What the heck is this? Who is this?’ And we also know we’re gonna make a lot of people go, ‘What the fuck happened to my band?’”
But he adds: “I think for us, creativity is way too big to be put in a box – and for us we’re not a one-trick pony.
“We like to really play with our palette and expand our abilities as songwriters and performers, and that’s what we did on this record.”
Bennington says while he doesn’t hate nu metal, Linkin Park “don’t want to be bound by a genre.”
He adds: “What we hated was being branded as something. If it’s just hard rock, we’d be like, ‘Are these people listening to the record?’ But we could equally be called a hip hop group, an electronic group, an alternative band.
“There are so many different parts to what we’re doing. That’s why we called it Hybrid Theory.”