Earlier this month, Linkin Park returned from a long, extremely warranted slumber, and people rejoiced. For roughly 12 hours. Then word of new singer Emily Armstrong’s connections to the Church of Scientology surfaced via former Scientologist Cedric Bixler-Zavala of The Mars Volta, and Linkin Park’s strong new foundation shattered into a million pieces. Armstrong released a frankly insulting almost-non-statement that didn’t even mention Scientology. Jaime Bennington, son of tragically deceased Linkin Park singer Chester Bennington, called out the band for erasing his father’s legacy. So did Chester’s mom, saying that she’d been left out of the loop despite promises to the contrary.
But all of these things – undoubtedly important and definitely the main reasons you should be skeptical of this cynical act of necromancy wearing Linkin Park’s skin – elide additional salient points: As a singer, Armstrong is fine, and the two new songs Linkin Park has released so far are aggressively mid. So much legacy-tarnishing grief for… this?
Yesterday the band released its second new song, “Heavy Is The Crown,” to ring in this year’s League of Legends Worlds tournament, and it’s exemplative of just how hollow this whole enterprise has proven to be. Sonically, “Heavy Is The Crown” has all the hallmarks of a classic Linkin Park song and exactly none of the soul. There’s the Mike Shinoda-fronted rap verses, the guitar-heavy chorus (now sung by Armstrong instead of Bennington), and even a sustained scream toward the end that somewhat calls back to Bennington’s legendarily lengthy scream from “Given Up.”
But unlike “Given Up,” which rules, “Heavy Is The Crown” does not earn its supposed emotional crescendo. The whole thing feels flat, like it’s spent a day in uncomfortable Linkin Park cosplay and just wants to go home and change into normal clothes. The instrumentals hark back to the Linkin Park of old but fail to land with any real impact. The lyrics don’t help. Shinoda’s verses are assembled from cliched platitudes, and I dare you to feel anything after reading the words underlying Armstrong’s chorus:
This is what you asked for, heavy is the crown
Fire in the sunrise, ashes rainin' down
Try to hold it in, but it keeps bleeding out
This is what you asked for, heavy is the, heavy is the crown
I’m not saying golden-age Linkin Park – a band I adored – was always poetry. But Bennington’s voice elevated the material. No matter what he was singing about, he put everything into it. More importantly, he had range – not just in the sense that he could push his voice into stratospheric territory, but in that he could sell a variety of emotions. His screams let loose truly cathartic anguish, and depending on the song, his singing voice dripped with passion, melancholy, or grief. Underneath all of that, he possessed a unique vulnerability. Straddling genres generally laced with machismo in rap and rock, Bennington managed to convey his own frailty in a way that resonated. Depression and mental health – viewed by many as weak back in the early 2000s – were at the forefront of his songs. There was an urgency to his message. You could always tell that he meant it.
Comparatively, Armstrong is perfectly serviceable. She can scream. She can sing. She does both reasonably well. But you can’t replace somebody who was one of a kind with “perfectly serviceable.” Flaws that might have otherwise been invisible spring to the surface. When she sings on these tracks – backed by instrumentals from men in their late 40s trying to rekindle the angst of their early 20s – her capabilities feel wasted. The new songs are far from an ideal showcase for her talents. And so far, possibly fearing that she might upend a holy grail, she has yet to make the old songs hers. Perhaps unavoidably, when she sings the classics, it feels like she’s doing karaoke.
And yet, Shinoda insists that this new entity must be Linkin Park.
“As the songs came into focus, the band’s DNA was really thick with this body of work,” he said in an interview with Billboard. “To call it anything else would be strange and misleading. We teach our kids that when you fall down, you have to get back up and you have to go try again, right? The idea of us doing some other thing, with this group of people and the sound of this music, feels like it would have been a resignation, in a way. I hate to say ‘cowardly,’ but it would feel like hedging a bet.”
I’m not saying Linkin Park never should have returned. I think there is a strong argument to be made for bringing back acts that have lost key members in ways that revere those people and allow fans to celebrate the art they left behind. But given the extenuating circumstances surrounding Armstrong and the weird wannabe limbo state the new music finds itself in, this ain’t it. We wished for more Linkin Park, and the monkey’s paw curled.
