Linkin Park have announced a new album, The Hunting Party. Read an interview with Mike Shinoda over at Noisey.
What do you think of the current state of rock music?
There’s so much music out there; there’s so much stuff that sounds like Haim or CHVRCHES or Vampire Weekend that I’m full. The thing I’m hungry for is not that. I turn on the rock station in L.A. and it sounds like Disney commercial music. And I’m confused by that. The dude from Foster the People was literally a jingle writer. No disrespect, but for me to make that stuff was kind of out of the question. I stepped back and said, “What’s the thing I want to hear that nobody else is making, and what’s the thing that we are uniquely positioned to make?” We threw out our old demos, and I talked to the guys and basically asked them to get in touch with who their 15-year-old self was. Not to make songs for 15-year-olds out there now—there are a lot of people out there who’ll make music because it’ll be popular with teenagers, but that’s not what we’re doing. I told our guitarist Brad, “If the kid you were at 15 heard what you made today, would he be proud of you? Or would he say, ‘That guy’s kind of a pussy.’?” Because he was listening to fucking Metallica and heavier at that point. I said, “Write a song that’ll make that kid play guitar.” So that’s what we ended up doing. We wanted to impress our inner teenager. When I was that age I was listening to Public Enemy and N.W.A. and Rakim. And when I did get into rock, it was Metallica and Alice in Chainz. The Nu-Metal thing and the alternative rock thing spawned from people learning from those bands, but those bands never made radio rock.