From Zero
May 8, 2026
I've been thinking about this album for a while. I've been thinking about reviewing it for a while. From Zero is a fascinating work to me. Explicitly a reset; implicitly a plea for approval.
I was going to put something early in this writeup about how Linkin Park never fell off. After re-listening to One More Light... okay maybe they did fall off a little. That album is upbeat and unapologetically poppy, and showcases the greatest vocal and emotional range of Chester Bennington's career, but the tracks are largely anemic, undeveloped.
Its cardinal sin, however, is that it keeps Chester and Mike Shinoda largely separated to different tracks, resulting in an album that feels strangely unincorporated. Its hip-hop elements, whether from Shinoda or from guests like Pusha T and Stormzy, feel pushed to the edges in a way that sits especially strangely for a band that once released two full albums of remixes in eager collaboration with a stacked slate of rappers.
But to the wider charge that Linkin Park fell off when they transitioned to a more pop sound I disagree, for two reasons. First, Linkin Park has always been pop. During the period from Hybrid Theory to Minutes to Midnight, they were credibly and comfortably one of the biggest bands in the world. Whatever they chose to put out--that was pop.
Second, there is no single transiton on the band's timeline between "rock" and "pop" sounds. Instead, they are on something more like a periodic orbit. Every few years, they careen like a comet around a blazing core of harsh electronic rock, then fling out for a few seasons into the outer reaches of cooler, more diverse sounds.
Cool is the operating word there, because that is ultimately both Linkin Park's secret sauce and Achilles' heel: their naked, relentless pursuit of the cool. It's what makes them both trend-chasers and trend-setters, it's what has driven their hits and misses in equal measure, and it's ultimately why they're still a name today.
Still. Cool has consequences, not all of them good. While I acknowledge that One More Light is the band's weakest album, it's actually The Hunting Party which is their most artless. In pursuit of a straight rock sound, the band strips out nearly all of their electronic accoutrements and more playful beats. On the publicity circuit Mike Shinoda also talked a good deal of shit about the decline of contemporary rock in favour of more pop-inflected bands like Chvrches--incredible shots from the hip given his own previous three records. Ironically, the band's counter to this alleged decline renders their sound indistguishable, vocals excepted, from the default late 2000s/early 2010s "alt" bands they made up to get mad at.
That brings us to the vocalists. One More Light, the band's climactic misfire, is frozen in amber as an unfortunate, unexpected cliffhanger, because three months after it came out Chester Bennington died and we never saw how the band might have intended to resolve that particular pop arc. Seven years later, the band is back with a reboot and a reshuffle.
So how does new vocalist Emily Armstrong fare?
In short, she slides into the lineup effortlessly, a blade between bricks, as though she has always been there. It's miraculous bordering on uncanny. Chester Bennington just might have been the most distinctive rock vocalist of his era, maybe alongside Serj Tankian, and his loss would seem to leave a hole that can't be filled. I half-wondered if Linkin Park would look for a new vocalist at all, as over the years Shinoda has expanded his own vocal duties beyond exclusively rap to incorporate more melodic and even some unclean deliveries.
But find a new vocalist they did, and despite those unfavourable odds, Armstrong delivers. Her performance is so pitch-perfect as to present a new problem: is she now cursed to play the chameleon in perpetuity rather than blend her own identity into the band and help it do what it has always done: change?
The question can be applied to either Armstrong or the album in equal measure. The answer, to both, is indecisive.
Let's dig into the songs. From Zero can be divided pretty neatly into three acts. Let's call the first one "We're back," both a thesis and a plea. The first real track (22-second intro notwithstanding), The Emptiness Machine, is the obvious lead single and an immaculately-assembled handoff. Shinoda takes the first minute (and the first verse), showcasing his evolved melodic range and maybe gesturing subtly to that alternate universe where he continues to go it alone at the mic.
Then he hands the mic to Armstrong, and she runs away with it, with a melodic second verse and a belted unclean second chorus which both affirm that after taking time to mourn and regroup, the band still has the juice. An easy, Meteora-flavoured opening victory for the album.
Cut to track two, Cut the Bridge, and I'm a lot less impressed. We jump from Meteora to Minutes to Midnight in tone, with a stripped-down, concert hall thumper that never crawls out from under the shadow of the latter album's Bleed It Out. Shinoda's more rap-inflected contributions are nice to see, but the song does far less to challenge Armstrong from either direction. With fare like this, the band cannot fully beat the allegations that their comeback is just playing the hits.
Track three swerves back to Meteora's lane, with Heavy Is the Crown bringing about an arguably more humble reflection on the band's fame and reputation than The Hunting Party, while delivering a sound that plays to the band's early strengths without landing near enough to any one prior track to constitute overt self-plagiarism. Shinoda and Armstrong are both in fine shape here, and the song has the grace to demonstrate awareness of the awkward crossroads this album is at. Good track.
Unfortunately, things take a dip for the middle act, which I'll call "We're Over". Track four, Over Each Other, dials down the tempo and the heat, both unfortunately to lukewarm. The track does offer Armstrong room to do more than just contend with Chester, with a more melancholic delivery, but the actual song supporting that performance is boring, forgettable breakup fare.
Casualty, the fifth song, has a bit more going for it, but I don't like it. It's a short, scrappy, hardcore track, and both Armstrong and Shinoda scream their way through it, which is fun but also further reveals a fundamental insecurity about Linkin Park's sound and identity more intentionally and productively realized with Heavy Is The Crown. More on that in a bit.
The best song of the worst act is Overflow. Primarily a Shinoda track, he struts with a staggered, off-beat rap delivery nowhere to be found in the band's early work. It's not an especially adventrous track beyond that, with Armstrong mostly running support in the chorus, but it is a nice showcase of the strong production the band shies away from elsewhere, with a dreamy landscape layered with industrial inflections.
The album crashes out of its second act straight into Hybrid Theory with its worst track, Two Faced. If Cut the Bridge is a bootleg, Two Faced is a mockbuster, almost a note-for-note and beat-for-beat royalty-free lift from One Step Closer. It's like when somebody needs to evoke Star Trek, or Superman, and changes just enough notes, always for the worse, to dodge a lawsuit. I hate it.
But all is not lost. I'm calling the third act "New Heights," because it's here that Linkin Park finally gestures to a sound that I think is both new and theirs. The best track on the album, Stained, gives us our working thesis. It gets there, ironically enough, with a sound Shinoda might have trashed a decade ago, landing somewhere close to PVRIS with a crunchy and morose dreampop beat heightened by the band's signature electronic and industrial soundscape.
IGYEIH (I gave you everything I had) faked me out. The first fifteen seconds seem to set up yet another hardcore concert hall howler the likes of which increasingly feel like the band has something to prove. But then the track abruptly reverses course, puts the wheels down, and fires up a grungy, growly complement and counterpoint to the previous song, albeit one that doesn't give Shinoda much to do.
The final song, Good Things Go, keeps developing the grunge ideas in the previous track and fuses them with the hip-hop elements that feel increasingly underexplored in contemporary Linkin Park. It's a good enough track that I forgive it for its title and the most asinine lyric on the record, "Sometimes bad things take the place where good things go."
The resulting album, maybe more than any other in the band's history, reflects a kind of identity crisis. We've seen Linkin Park go back to the well and we've seen them chase new sounds, both multiple times before, but here they are doing both of these things at once, sometimes on the same track. Armstrong's performance on the album passes with flying colours, and I'm actually more worried she'll outgrow the band than the other way around.
My biggest problem with From Zero, with Linkin Park, maybe with Mike Shinoda, is that their recurring need to prove themselves as a "real" rock band always comes at the expense of their hip-hop influences and innovations, which are a large part of what set them apart from the pack in the first place.
It's that absense, not Chester's, that I point to wherever it feels like From Zero is missing something.