After Mike Shinoda teased fans earlier this week with a snippet of an unreleased Linkin Park track, he's offering up another single from the vault featuring vocals from late singer Chester Bennington. Hear it all day today on Audacy Rock and Alternative stations nationwide.
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Four years ago, Linkin Park co-founder Mike Shinoda revealed to fans that there was archived material from their last album that late singer Chester Bennington was featured on, explaining at the time that the band had "mixed" more than the finished album.
"Friendly Fire" follows last year's vault track "Lost," also featuring Chester's vocals, singing on the new offering, “We’re falling apart for no reason / We’re pulling the trigger in a useless war / If we go back and go into the black / What are we fighting for? / What are we fighting?/ It’s just friendly fire.”
During his latest Audacy Check In, Mike Shinoda told us he was hesitant to release old Linkin Park songs after Bennington’s death saying, “My instinct, in the beginning, was 'no.' Maybe I was a little unsure, but I was saying, 'it depended on what we find...' There's a whole album of demos that no one has ever heard, half of them have vocals on them, a handful of them are full-blown, finished songs," Shinoda said.
Also today, Linkin Park has announced the forthcoming release of Papercuts, an essential collection of generational anthems presented in their first-ever career-spanning greatest hits album, which is set to arrive on April 12. Digital downloads, black & color vinyl versions (and Zoetrope picture disc), and cassette editions will be available HERE for pre-order. Check out the full tracklisting below.
Linkin Park - Papercuts (Singles Collection 2000-2023) tracklisting:
1. Crawling
2. Faint
3. Numb/Encore
4. Papercut
5. Breaking The Habit
6. In The End
7. Bleed It Out
8. Somewhere I Belong
9. Waiting For The End
10. Castle Of Glass
11. One More Light
12. Burn It Down
13. What I’ve Done
14. QWERTY
15. One Step Closer
16. New Divide
17. Leave Out All The Rest
18. Lost
19. Numb
20. Friendly Fire
“In the making of each Linkin Park album, I want to love and believe in each individual song completely. I hope that if any one track is heard on its own in the world, it is something I can feel proud of, and something that takes root inside the listener and becomes part of the energy that connects us," Mike Shinoda says of Papercuts.
"Curating the tracks for Papercuts was a joy," he adds. "Each song in this collection is both a singular moment on our timeline and an evolving story that is as much ours as it is yours. From our first release ‘One Step Closer’ to the brand-new ‘Friendly Fire,’ this tracklist spans all our chapters so far. Thank you for being a part of our journey. We hope you enjoy 'Papercuts.'"
Hear Linkin Park's brand new single "Friendly Fire" all day today on Audacy Rock and Alternative stations nationwide, plus follow along to hear it in the mix now on Linkin Park Radio.