Linkin Park will release a previously unreleased song, “Friendly Fire,” featuring the late Chester Bennington.
The band shared a teaser for the synthpop-inspired track on their social media, adding that the song was taken from the band’s rehearsals for their latest album, ‘One More Light,’ which was released just two months before Bennington’s suicide in 2017.
The excerpt, which appears to be the chorus, contains the lines: “We’re falling apart for no reason/We’re pulling the trigger on a pointless war/If we turn around and go dark/What are we fighting for?”? /Why are we fighting?/It’s just friendly fire.
It is not yet known when the song will be released.
20 “Friendly Fire” #FriendlyFireLP pic.twitter.com/YZVKAXKq9w
– LINKIN PARK (@linkinpark) February 19, 2024
The existence of “Friendly Fire” was first mentioned by Shinoda in 2020. “We mixed more [songs] than [were on] the finished album and we mixed a few [of] sing -another one just to see if any of them are a good fit. cuts or something else. [Or] could we use it for the B-side and that was ‘Friendly Fire,'” he said (via AltPress).
After sharing that the song was co-written by “One More Light” collaborator Jon Green, Shinoda added, “I still love this song. Is it somewhere? Did we turn off “Friendly Fire” at any point? We didn’t do that, did we?
Fans continued to ask Shinoda to release the unreleased song, to which he responded, “You will have to wait years to hear this song. »
Speaking to NME in November, Shinoda commented on the future of Linkin Park, confirming that “there are no plans at the moment”.
“I always tell people that when there is news, I will let you know. We’ve been working on this for a while and I think our expectations for a true re-release were pretty high.
“I don’t like releasing Greatest Hits stuff or re-releasing remasters of stuff we’ve done, [so] if we were to re-release one of our Linkin Park albums, we’d want it to be a big deal. If we can’t get that quality, we won’t do it. If it’s not great, I don’t think we should do it.
Last month, Shinoda also admitted that he wanted Linkin Park to succeed “without being recognized.”
“Reputation has never been a top priority. But it happened,” Shinoda wrote in an article for The Guardian, before saying that he and Chester Bennington did not want to be seen as the faces of Linkin Park.
“If the photographer had his way it would just be Chester, or me and Chester, but we want people to know that this band is all of us, not just the singers in the front,” he said. added. “Linkin Park being well-known or well-liked is a blessing, but do I want the group to succeed without being recognized? Maybe. The celebrity aspect of my career has always seemed strange to me.