Early in its career, Linkin Park was known as Hybrid Theory.
That eventually became the title of the Los Angeles heavy-rock band’s diamond-certified 2000 debut album, but it also remains the best descriptor of the sextet’s musical approach.
In the course of a career — which to date has included seven studio albums and two remix sets — Linkin Park has put a premium on unapologetic musical melding, whether it’s joining rap and heavy metal or venturing into electronic music or full-fledged collaborations with rappers such as Jay-Z and Kendrick Lamar.
Whatever they do, it has worked: Five of those seven albums have made their debuts at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, including the recently released ″One More Light,″ and six have gone platinum or better.
″We’ve always been about mixing things,″ rapper/keyboardist/producer Mike Shinoda said, speaking by telephone from Los Angeles.
″With every album, every song, we’re trying to challenge ourselves. Linkin Park fans know that, every album, you kind of never know what you’re going to get. The style can change dramatically and different elements, different genres that we listen to, might sit more in the forefront than others.”
With “One More Light,” however, the drama has been particularly pronounced.
From the February release of its first single, ″Heavy,″ featuring the singer Kiiara, it was clear that the 10-track set would be unlike any of its predecessors. Working more extensively than ever before with outside songwriters, Linkin Park created an album with a pronounced flavor of mainstream pop, drawing from the same well of electronic and hip-hop influences that can be found anywhere on the Billboard Hot 100.
That’s a province most acts would aspire to, but it didn’t sit well with the headbanging contingent among Linkin Park’s following.
In terms of just the honesty and the intimacy of this album,″ he added, ″I think there was no holding back. We just chased the greatest music we can make, and you never know how people are going to respond to it.″
Linkin Park’s first order of business with ″One More Light″ was to ″flip our writing process,″ according to Shinoda, creating lyrics and melodies first rather than coming up with instrumental ″beds″ and writing the songs on top of them.
″The very first thing we’d do each day,″ Shinoda said, ″is we’d get into the studio and say, ‘What’s on my mind? What do I want to sing about and write about?’ And that defined a whole different kind of writing. It builds a wonderful foundation to put everything else on top of. And the sound-making is actually one of the most fun parts for me, so then it’s like icing on the cake. I know I’ve got a strong song, a strong foundation and then it’s just icing to put on top of it″.
With ″One More Light″ charting high in several other countries — including No. 1 in Canada, Hungary and the Czech Republic and Top 5 in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and Australia — Linkin Park recently kicked off a world tour that will include a stop at Riverbend Music Center in Cincinnati on Aug. 12.
It will be a long haul, and Delson said that fans should be ready for even more musical changes when they come to see the band.
″I would say surprisingly — or not so surprisingly — these songs are very natural for us to play because of the way they were written,″ he explained. ″They’re almost easier to share and play, whereas on other albums that translation process from what we did in the studio to the stage took some thinking and some work.
“These songs are very versatile. They’re natural to play. They fit in with the other songs really well.”
″And one thing we’re pushing ourselves to do, in the spirit that the songs we’ve written, is to be able to play the songs in different forms, whether it’s the version you hear on the album or it’s something really stripped down and intimate,″ Delson concluded.
″I think these songs lend thems
elves to that kind of dimensionality.″