Linkin Park

A nostalgic trip back to 2001

“This is what you asked for, heavy is the crown” I heard my son L sing. I was confused, how did he know a song by Linkin Park which was released a year earlier. He was whispering the line almost instead of how Linkin Park singer Emily Armstrong screams the lyrics which made me think he had heard a cover.

L had actually heard the song as part of the soundtrack of the series he was watching, Arcane.

I got nostalgic thinking about the time that I was introduced to Linkin Park. It’s a story I have told often on the Horns Up podcast.

I remember this night vividly, it was April 2001 and I was watching the MCM channel in Abu Dhabi late one night. MCM was a French music channel that played rock and metal music videos during the late night slot. A song I hadn’t heard before played and had me mesmerised, there were screaming vocals like I hadn’t heard before. I waited till the end for the credits and then noted in my book,

Linkin Park - Crawling

Over the coming months, a burnt cd copy of Hybrid Theory was one of my most listened to cds alongside Limp Bizkit (who I had discovered a year earlier) and even Iron Maiden and Def Leppard. By the end of the year, Linkin Park blew up and everyone had a favourite song from the album, In the End.

I tried so hard and got so far

But in the end, it doesn’t even matter

I had to fall to lose it all

But in the end, it doesn’t even matter

The lyrics became the refrain of teenagers not just in Abu Dhabi where I lived but also around the world.

A couple of years later, came their 2nd album, Meteora and it connected with me even more. From the song, Somewhere I belong

I wanna heal, I wanna feel like I’m close to something real

I wanna find something I’ve wanted all along

Somewhere I belong

I only understood why it truly struck a chord with me only 2 decades later.

Linkin Park only got more mainstream with their remix album, Collision Course, released in 2004 which was a collaboration with Jay-Z. An album, both metalheads and hip hop fans in my college ended up listening to.

By the time Minute to Midnight released in 2007, I was heavily in extreme metal. After listening to the album single, What I’ve Done, I realised that the band had moved away from their nu-metal sound and it was also not something I enjoyed anymore.

I barely followed the band over the next decade until 2017, until vocalist Chester Bennington passed away. I spent the next week relistening to Hybrid Theory and Meteora and felt a tinge of the teenage angst again. Listening to the track Heavy and One More Light from their last album was not easy.

Fast forward to 2024 and Emily Armstrong is announced as the new vocalist of the band along with a new album, The Emptiness Machine. I was initially quite skeptical of it as a cash grab but slowly warmed up the idea as I heard the first couple of singles. The 2nd single was Heavy is the Crown

Close to 25 years after I first heard Linkin Park, I’m going to finally get to see the band live at Lollapalooza in Mumbai. It’s going to be even more special as I’m going to watch them with my son. Looking forward to creating new musical memories.