Linkin Park – The Hunting Party

Those of you who were angsty teenagers in the late noughties may well recall slamming your black-painted bedroom door after screaming at your parents that ‘emo’ most definitely wasn’t a phase – those who wisely avoided this trend will probably remember laughing at these ‘rebels’ who thought heavy guitar music accompanied by screams, tears and occasional ironic rap thrown in was alternative metal and ‘deep, man’. This movement or stagnancy is more commonly known as ‘Nu Metal. Unfortunately, that isn’t a typo.

However, while those days are remembered by embarrassing snapshots that those depicted wish could be burnt and a smattering of kids in Camden trying to emulate those days ‘ironically’, Linkin Park cannot be said to have moved on very far. As they bawl on All For Nothing, “there’s nothing they can -expletive- say that they haven’t said before”. Malakian of System of a Down gives strength to Rebellion – possibly the best song out of a disappointing bunch – but the solitary change of genre in Drawbar to a despondent piano backing with Rage Against The Machine’s vocalist falls pretty flat.

Egotistical guitars and angry drumming kick the mercifully short and indecisively composed tracks along and perhaps gives justificatory tribute to the fact that Linkin Park not only wanted to ‘go back to their roots’ with this album, but bid farewell to their manager in order to achieve this by themselves. It’s important to note here that the members were in high school when they formed the band in the mid 90s, and can therefore be forgiven for airing such juvenile musical aggression on a supposedly self-reclaiming release.

Predictable on the surface, hollow on the inside and bearing a ribbon of frustration winding its way through this re-gifted hour of near indistinguishably sung tantrums rebranded as lyrics with the occasional ill placed electronic effect that sounds as though Hahn just hit the synth in frustration; The Hunting Party is less a return to the beginning and more a sign of an impending, overdue end. 

Francesca Laidlaw

The Hunting Party was released on 13^th June 2014. For further information or to order the album visit Linkin Park’s website here.

Watch the video for Guilty All The Same (feat. Rakin) here: