It’s Linkin Park, but not the Linkin Park you know
A FEW years back, Southern California rock band Linkin Park contacted Harvard Business School. They were concerned: The record industry was in a meltdown. Rock radio, a vital promotional engine for the band, was dead. Old revenue streams, such as album sales, were drying up. The new ones were unreliable.
After a semester of independent study, a team from the school came up with some ideas. Linkin Park needed to diversify. Music would now be just one not-particularly-consequential element of their brand.
Linkin Park set about enacting the team’s suggestions, mostly to great success: They reached out to influencers, expanded their brand’s merchandising opportunities and set up a venture capital firm similar to Bono’s Elevation Partners.
And now they have released One More Light, the band’s first album since their Harvard overhaul. As an artistic work, it’s fine, a subtle and contemplative pop album from a band not known to be any of those things. As an exercise in branding, it’s a disaster.
One More Light fits uneasily into the band’s omnivorous catalogue. Linkin Park’s official 2000 debut, Hybrid Theory, is the most consequential rap-metal album ever released, and one of the most successful rock albums of all time. The group has spent the last 16 years copying it, ignoring it and trying to outrun it.
One More Light feels foreign and final. It’s a beyond-fervid embrace of the pop sonics the band has flirted with for years. It contains little rap and even less metal. There are thoughtful acoustic songs and rote electro-pop songs. At times, it sounds as though the Chainsmokers and Simon and Garfunkel had a really terrifying baby.
In their early days, every Linkin Park song was like a wounded animal, an authentic expression of young punk angst that was bro-centric but effective. They weren’t always geniuses, but you knew that they meant it. But, with most of the band’s members now on the other side of 40, they’re fumbling with the uncertainties common to many artists in the late middle age of their careers.
One More Light offers no answers to questions that may be unanswerable: How does a band, built for the efficient expression of a very specific kind of youthful misery, stay relevant now that they are rock stars and husbands and fathers?
This is what they shouldn’t have done: hire a gaggle of professional songwriters previously employed by Britney Spears and Justin Bieber. For Linkin Park, who seldom used outside writers, it’s a way to split things down the middle.
One More Light is virtually unrecognisable as a Linkin Park album. The band’s guitars are muted, its usual volcanic rage
downgraded to a mild pique, its co-front man, rapper Mike Shinoda, mostly absent. One More Light isn’t awful, but you can feel there is something missing. Sincerity is the only real currency Linkin Park have, and this is the first album they’ve ever made that feels false.
With most of the band’s members now on the other side of 40, they’re fumbling with the uncertainties