Linkin Park’s new album One More Light was released last Friday (19) and members Chester Bennington and Mike Shinoda are continuing to stick up for the lack of “metal” on the new album. In a brand new interview by Kerrang!, Chester Bennington is doubling down on those that might accuse them of selling out. Initially, they discussed how they knew the album was going to be different, and then things escalated. Bennington never really cared what old school fans would think:
“And I think… I’m not going to speak… this is not an opinion of the entire band… I think my response was ‘cool, fuck them we don’t want them as fans anyways.’ By now, if people don’t know that we can throw a curveball then fuck them!”
Bennington defended his band:
“Either you like the song or you don’t and if you don’t like the song because you hear it and on a kneejerk reaction it’s like ‘oh it doesn’t have metal in it so I don’t like it’, that’s fine, like whatever.
But if you’re gonna be the person who says like ‘they made a marketing decision to make this kind of record to make money’ you can fucking meet me outside and I will punch you in your fucking mouth because that is the wrong fucking answer.
Because guess what, calling us a sell out for that purpose is… selling out on your fucking excuse as to why you don’t like it. You’re a fucking pussy. For any band to take musical risks because you like what you’re doing in spite of what you know some people will say they don’t like, it doesn’t matter if they like it or not – what matters is that you took the chance to do something that you felt was important to you and that’s what being an artist is all about.
When we did Minutes To Midnight, this was a conversation we literally had, ‘this could end our career’. We all had that real honest conversation like ‘look I know we’re doing this because this is what we love and we really really… this is important to us. This could honestly be like the worst decision we’ve ever made professionally. Creatively probably the best thing, professionally it might be the worst.’ We were like ‘we’re good with that. We can live with that.”
He wrapped up his rant with the final statement:
“When you make it personal, like a personal attack against who we are as people, like dude shut up. That means that I can actually have feelings about it and most of the time my feelings are I want to kill you.”
If they brought some of that attitude to the album, perhaps it wouldn’t sound so much like Chainsmokers, but who are we to judge? Check out the full interview here.
[via ThePrp]
