Linkin Park's new album could be out by next June

Friday, February 11, 2005

Oct 26 2009

Linkin Park Album Will Be 'Grandiose Insanity,' Chester Bennington Says
Frontman thinks their next record could be out by June.

After nearly five years in the incubator, earlier this month, Chester Bennington finally released Out of Ashes, the debut disc from his long-gestating side project Dead by Sunrise. Let's just say he's not waiting that long to get back to his day job.

"Linkin Park are in the studio right now," he told MTV News backstage at this past weekend's Ulalume Festival in Columbia, Maryland. "And we've got a sh-- ton of music. I mean, really, it's ridiculous."

Bennington said LP are once again working with producer Rick Rubin — who produced their last effort, 2007's Minutes to Midnight — on the new album. And, yes, they're still sticking to the concept Bennington had first mentioned last year, only, you know, with a slightly different, slightly more realistic twist.

"It's like, 'Oh, let's go and make this giant opus that no one's ever done. It's going to cost billions of dollars and take forever.' And we're like, 'Wait a second, it's going to cost billions of dollars and take forever,' " he laughed. "[So] we might need to just make a record and still try to do a concept but figure out a way to do it without actually waiting another five or six years to put out a record, to try to pull off all the grandiose insanity we were thinking of doing. And we're doing that. So I would imagine, I'm guessing even conservatively, that we'll probably have a record out by June of next year."

Bennington said that, in keeping with Linkin Park tradition, the new album will be sonically adventurous and that it might even feature a few tunes he'd intended for Dead by Sunrise's follow-up to Ashes.

"It's kind of funny, because I wrote a song, and I was positive it was a Dead by Sunrise song, and I was in the studio playing it, and [LP guitarist] Brad [Delson] goes, 'You are putting that down right now!' " he said. "And I was like, 'Well, apparently that's a Linkin Park song.' The song is called called 'F---ing Awesome,' by the way."

Sounds rad. And though he's pushing hard on the new Linkin Park album, Bennington's not quite finished with Dead by Sunrise — not by a long shot, it would seem.

"We are going to tour, and we are going to make more records," he said. "And we're actually talking about doing a festival of just the bands we're in, so it will be Linkin Park, Orgy, Fort Minor, Dead by Sunrise, Julien-K, Circuit Freq, JK-DJs — it's a pretty good bill. It'll have to be called the Narcissist Tour."

By James Montgomery


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