From linkinpark.com:

We are proud to announce that Linkin Park will be playing a very intimate show for LP Underground members at the House of Blues in West Hollywood, CA on Friday, May 18. This event will support Music For Relief’s Power The World initiative, which is a pledge to help 1 million families gain access to sustainable energy.

Tickets for this show go on sale exclusively to LPU members starting on Monday, April 30, at 10AM PDT at LPUnderground.com. In addition to general admission tickets, we are offering Premium VIP access, as well as a limited number of travel packages that include VIP tickets, hotel accommodations, and more.

Join the LPU at LPUnderground.com for access to this special show. Tickets are limited and will sell out quickly, so please log on right at 10AM for your best chance. We look forward to kicking off the LIVING THINGS tour with LP Underground members and Music For Relief supporters in LA.

-Chester

From thehundreds.com:

Can you be mainstream and still be cool? It’s a question we are forced to ask ourselves at The Hundreds. Although we aren’t nearly a mainstream brand, we continue to grow and flourish, and one day we will stand at that crossroads. So, can you be mainstream and still be cool?

In short, the answer is Yes. Although “Cool” is subjective, I think most people would agree that household brand names like Apple and Nike and Kanye West are still, in the most general sense, Cool.

It’s hard for me to reconcile that with the philosophies I’ve held my entire life, that Cool is a by-product of exclusivity, rarity, and the underground. As someone baptized in subcultures, to go mainstream and above-ground was to forfeit. Stay core, stay poor. That’s the mantra.

As a teenager in the ’90s Southern California punk scene, in my Dickies and Converse, a band like Linkin Park was everything I stood against. This band didn’t represent me, they couldn’t speak to my underdog sensibilities; in my eyes, they bathed in the mainstream, and they swam with the current. As soon as a band enlisted in the “Furious 5 at 9? on KROQ (the top 5 songs of the day on L.A.’s alternative station), they were dismissed as my sworn enemies. And a band like Linkin Park, perhaps the most popular rock band of our generation, couldn’t get off the Furious 5 at 9 if they paid.

Mike Shinoda’s dealt with it. As frontman for Linkin Park, he has weathered the detractors and the parodies and the critical assassination. But at the same time, he has also been showered with the dedication of millions of loyal fans worldwide, built a wildly successful music career, maintained longevity, and blessed influence on an entire wave of bands that followed. I’d say that’s pretty Cool. Very Cool.

As I sit here with Mike in the very recording studio Linkin Park concocted their new album, Living Things, not only are my ears open to the music, but so are my eyes. I see the weathered instruments that have bled into this record, the sleepless nights stained across the piano keys and guitar strings, I see the scribbled lyric sheets splayed across the bookstand. As we talk about the record, I grow to understand not only what this band has done, but what they are doing. Ask any thirty-year-old about Linkin Park, and they’ll sweep them into the rap-rock abyss. But ask a teenager who Linkin Park is, and they’ll sing a different tune.

Literally. They will sing a new song, unfamiliar, perhaps unrecognizable to anything you know. Because while the rest of their peers faded to black, Linkin Park never stopped evolving and making new music. Yes, their ’00 debut rap-rock album Hybrid Theory struck diamond, but they have made 4 contrasting, borderline artsy, records since, sold over 50,000,000 albums, and scored two Grammys. That’s Cool.

Living Things debuts June 26th. It’s by far the band’s best, most comprehensive work, surprisingly jumpstarting with LP’s familiar, heavy rap-n-roll sound of yesteryear. The first two tracks are like old friends to Linkin Park fans and critics, reunited after the band strayed and searched and experimented with the avant-garde. My favorite Linkin Park album was their last, A Thousand Suns, because it played like a book is read. It was cerebral and heady, it was an emotional story that had weight.

Don’t get it twisted, Living Things doesn’t ditch that. By the third song, you are jarringly pulled into uncharted territory. The music grows in brooding intensity, it has an exotic flavor, tinged with modes of everything. Linkin Park, you may know, was originally titled Hybrid Theory (as their introductory record) because their ethos was to fuse and mix the things they loved — not just music genres, but artistic elements, ethnicities, cultures. This album hearkens back to that philosophy, it’s a sonic cornucopia: heavy bass lines and dubstep-reminiscent back beats, Chester Bennington’s otherworldly vocals screeching over punishing guitars.

Living Things is an accurate gauge of where Linkin Park sits right now at this point in their career. Most, if not all, rock bands never make it this far, especially in this climate of sleepy Bon Iver music and crybaby rap. Plus, this many creative personalities and egos, on the road, performing, writing together, for over a decade and a half. Think about it, how many radio acts from the mid-’90s are still crushing it? That’s Cool.

I follow Mike a couple miles away to the studios where Living Things is being mixed.Lead guitarist Brad Delson is in the back, we talk about work, we talk more about personal lives.

Then they introduce me to Manny, the mixer. Although Manny the Mixer sounds like a kid’s cartoon, what this guy does is anything but child’s play. Two decades in the business, he earned his stripes in the days of early ’90s West Coast rap, and has the harrowing “Behind the Music” tales as evidence. He just finished that new Bieber “Boyfriend” single and is currently toiling on John Mayer’s album. He does his best to explain the science of mixing to me, but it’s alien jargon. I’m overwhelmed by the sea of faders and convoluted tentacles hardwired into cabinets. But at the end of the day, I see what it takes to make these records. I can almost fathom what Linkin Park does to achieve creation. It’s not an art you can pay to download, process with a filter, ReTweet, or learn through a Youtube tutorial. To make a powerful record that communicates a story and a mission, that speaks to legions of followers,… takes brains, it takes heart, and it takes fists.

And that’s very Cool indeed.

From lptimes.com:

Chester on Loveline, Mike will be on the show April 19

Chester and Brandon Boyd from Incubus were on Loveline last night, watch and download the webcast here. Please note that the conversation contains adult content. Mike and Mike Einziger will be on the show on April 19.
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Mike talked to NME and 97X about Linkin Park’s new album

Mike had an interview on 97X , where he talked about the “Living Things”. Listen or Download the Interview on lptimes.com

In an interview with NME, Mike denied reports that the band were set to return to their nu-metal sound of their early records, but did say that the band were more in touch with their roots.

Linkin Park have spoken about their fifth studio album ‘Living Things’ and have said they believe the album takes them “back to their roots”.

The album is due for release on June 25 in the UK and June 26 in the US. It is the follow-up to the band’s 2010 fourth album ‘A Thousand Suns’ and has once again been produced by Rick Rubin. You can hear the album’s lead-off single, which is titled ‘Burn It Down’, by scrolling down to the bottom of the page and clicking.

Speaking to NME about ‘Living Things’, co-frontman Mike Shinoda denied reports that the band were set to return to their nu-metal sound of their early records, but did say that the band were more in touch with their roots.

Asked if the record was more guitar-heavy than their recent albums, Shinoda replied: “That’s actually been misinterpreted. What we’ve actually said is that the record gets back to our roots and it’s captured a feeling that we haven’t gone after in many years. I think that’s gone misconstrued as a return to heavy guitars. There are guitars on the record of course though.”

Then asked if this meant the album continued in the vein of their more experimental fourth album ‘A Thousand Suns’, Shinoda said: “I’ll say it like this, with ‘Minutes To Midnight’ and even more so with ‘A Thousands Sun’, we were making an effort to get away from the sound of the first two records. The reason for that was that we felt if we made a third record that sounded that way, we’d be pigeonholed into doing that forever. Everybody just gravitated towards the stuff that sounded different and as we got into ‘A Thousand Suns’ it got even more different.”

The singer went on to say that the album does not signal the band “going back to their old ways”, but that they were more open to incorporating elements of their early material in their new songs.

He added: “I think we got so interested in adding new tools to the toolbox that we forgot what was already in the toolbox. After making a few records which just focused on the different stuff, it became fresh again to go back and use the old tools. It’s definitely not going back to our old ways, we’ve used all the tools in the toolbox.”

Linkin Park will tour the US this summer as part of a co-headline trek with Incubus. They will also play a small number of European dates in late May and early June.

“BURN IT DOWN” NBA playoff spot and music video sneak peek on TNT. Watch it here

Linkin Park’s fifth album, LIVING THINGS will be released on June 26, 2012, pre-order will be available soon at http://linkinpark.com.
You can also listen to the new single “Burn it down” on burnitdown.linkinpark.com or on soundcloud.com

source: lptimes.com

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From: mikeshinoda.com

Monday is almost here.

Early Monday morning, our new single BURN IT DOWN will be released. The LIVING THINGS album pre-sale will begin. You’ll see the album cover, the track listing, and hear about some new tour plans. My bandmates and I are very excited for this week.

Many of you know our story up until this point. We built the band upon the idea of fusing all our favorite styles of music–as different as they might be–into one, signature sound. Our first two albums were the result of a lot of hard work, perseverance, smarts, and luck, to build a toolbox that would provide us with what we needed to make the best songs we could at the time.

Success came at a pivotal time in an industry that was about to take a nosedive, and we were able to establish ourselves before things changed drastically. Hybrid Theory became the best-selling album of the year, worldwide. After Meteora‘s success, we realized that we needed to step back and think about our future, in order to have one. We decided we had to had to veer away from the main thing upon which our success was built: the music.

When I tried to explain this pivotal moment to a friend of mine, he had a hard time understanding. He said, “It’s like you invented the Big Mac or the iPod, then decided not to sell it anymore. Why the hell would you do that?”

Trying to explain how personal and artistic choices factor in for a band like ours is difficult. As we finished up “A Thousand Suns” in 2010, I found myself having to try to do it often, in interviews and to myself. Before we even finished the songs, each guy in my band knew it was a polarizing and challenging album, one that people would probably love or hate. I suppose that it didn’t really matter if it made sense to anyone but us — for a while, we had to steer as far away from the early sound of Linkin Park as possible, or else we would be trapped making the exact same music over and over until we had to call it quits.

Thinking back: as we wrote Minutes To Midnight and A Thousand Suns, I would sometimes bring in demos that sounded like something from the first two albums. Those demos were always met with a negative reaction by my bandmates, and I tended to agree. I loved the journey toward a new, unknown sound. With each experiment, we discovered new ways to make songs, and we filled our toolbox with tons of new tools. With each song, we tried both cutting-edge and classic gear; we started with radically different seeds; and we approached the vocals with a virtual blindfold on. And, about a year ago, I realized that our toolbox was virtually overflowing with great tools.

But we were avoiding something.

In the early part of our career, we were inexperienced. We made decisions on all fronts that some of us regret (some times a little, some times a lot). And some decisions (like my fire-engine red hair back in the day) were things that I don’t really regret, but I simply wouldn’t do today. All those things spun together to create a complicated uneasiness about the past that the band wasn’t able to come to terms with for a while.

Luckily, I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Over the course of the last year, the subject kept popping up, and we talked about how to tastefully bridge the gap between all the musical places we’ve been, to marry together all the ideas we’ve accumulated about how to make a song. And as LIVING THINGS began taking shape, the most powerful shift I saw take place was the acceptance and eagerness to use all the tools in the toolbox, not just some. Everything at once, together.

Some people have already compared our new album to the early ones. I suppose it depends on how you want to make that comparison (by the way, it’s certainly not about guitars). For me, it’s all about getting back to the real “hybrid theory” — not the album with that name, but the idea that the six guys in our band have drastically different tastes in music, and the blending of all those sounds into one is exactly what we built our band upon.

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The single BURN IT DOWN and the album LIVING THINGS (presale) will be available tomorrow.