It’s been almost 3 years since Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington passed away. While the band has been busy working together as well as planning a special 20th anniversary edition of their debut album Hybrid Theory, Mike Shinoda is now revealing that the band have at least one unreleased song with Chester Bennington.
While also working on new solo music, Mike Shinoda has passed the time this year by embarking on a constant series of Twitch streams, where he plays Animal Crossing, sparks conversations with fans, and interacts in a way that simply wasn’t possible many years ago. During a Twitch stream (helpfully recorded by Linkin Park Live), Mike opened up about “Friendly Fire”, an unreleased song featuring Bennington, recorded during the sessions for One More Light.
“We mixed more than [are on] the finished album and we mixed a couple other songs just to see if one of them would make the cut or whatever. [Or] if we could use it for a B-side and it was Friendly Fire.”
Unfortunately for Linkin Park and music fans in general, Shinoda doused hope of hearing the track anytime soon.
“You literally are going to have to wait years to hear that song FYI,” Shinoda said about “Friendly Fire”.
Much like what happened with the late Chi Cheng of Deftones (specifically, their unreleased album Eros), releasing music with a band member passing is a complicated progress. As Shinoda noted during the livestream, it’s not just something you can drop on the Internet and say “hey, here’s an unreleased Linkin Park song”.
Mike talking about an unreleased Linkin Park song from One More Light called “Friendly Fire” that he really likes. He says we will hear it eventually. pic.twitter.com/NKc0TgKNEa
— Linkin Park Live (@LPLive) June 18, 2020
