Linkin Park
Brisbane Entertainment Centre, Brisbane, QLD
Thursday, March 5th
A generational mix flocked to the Brisbane Entertainment Centre on Thursday night, plagued by nostalgia for the early 2000s as they entered the venue for the second night of Linkin Park’s Brisbane tour dates.
For some fans it was a brand new experience, whether that was due to the band’s revived lineup and most recent album From Zero, or because they’d simply missed the last tour held back in 2013, when Linkin Park were still led by the one and only Chester Bennington.
It’s certainly been a long time since that era of the band, with Bennington sadly passing in 2017 and splitting the band’s legacy into two sides. After a seven-year hiatus spent recovering and redirecting, the alternative rock band re-emerged with new music and a new vocalist, Emily Armstrong (Dead Sara).
Band members Mike Shinoda, Dave “Phoenix” Farrell, Joe Hahn, Emily Armstrong, and Colin Brittain took to the stage, beginning with 2003 hit “Somewhere I Belong”. The familiar opening riff drew the kind of roar that reminds you the depth at which these songs have taken root in people’s memories. Emo anthem “Crawling” followed, and Armstrong made her first real statement of the night, her face visibly reddening as she pushed into the upper register.
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For the Bennington-era catalogue, Armstrong largely let the crowd carry the melody, or sang in the style of the original recordings – a conscious, respectful decision not to tread on sacred ground. The grace was admirable, but Armstrong is a genuinely extraordinary vocalist, and those crescendoed chorus moments were precisely when the room needed her to show off her obvious skills and prove herself the powerhouse that she is. The restraint was understandable, it’s still technically early days, but the opportunity was there.
Despite From Zero having been out for well over a year, the crowd’s energy noticeably dipped when the setlist ventured away from the classics. The band clearly felt it and did the extra legwork, Shinoda coaxing seated sections to their feet, Armstrong keeping the energy relentlessly high.
“The Emptiness Machine” was the night’s most precisely engineered moment. Shinoda eased in for the second verse as the lasers reignited in the bridge, pulsing in perfect time with “I only wanted to be part of something” — props to the set and lighting designers for an incredibly enhanced experience, be it the lasers, backdrop visuals, or smokey pyrotechnics.
The stage fell dark and quiet then, save for blue lasers flickering haphazardly in the black, before a thumping alarm sequence kicked the crowd back into gear for “The Catalyst”.
“Burn It Down” followed, with timed visuals of cascading sand that gave the song a weight it might not have carried otherwise. Some of the longer anticipatory intros that peppered the night built beautifully in theory, but landed softer than the wind-up deserved. The slow burn works best when it’s saving itself for the mega-hits, not warming up a Thursday night crowd still finding their feet.
“You guys ready to jump?” Armstrong asked, before the whole floor began clapping in unison, the mosh pit stomping along in kind. Shinoda returned to guitar and rapped the majority, while Armstrong alternated between killing the high notes in the chorus and picking up a tambourine in the gaps between. She made it look effortless, which it certainly wasn’t.
Then the room shifted, with Shinoda leading Fort Minor’s “Where’d You Go, fusing his two musical identities. The song arrived quietly, and the crowd seemed to absorb it differently to everything else. While the single was originally written from the perspective of a partner left at home while their loved one goes on tour, the chorus had a very Bennington-shaped hole in this instance.
A hush fell over the floor that felt less like calm and more like everyone retreating inward at the same moment, collectively carrying the same thought about who wasn’t standing on that stage anymore. The high-voltage energy Armstrong and Shinoda brought wasn’t quite matched from the crowd’s end, but that wasn’t a bad thing in this moment. It was just the room doing what it needed to do.
Sadness was replaced by that angsty adrenaline-injected sound quickly afterwards, lifting the mood once more. Shinoda turned to face the crowd and raised his hands slowly and deliberately, parting the floor. The pit opened on command for “Two Faced”, and without hesitation, two walls of people sprinted headlong at each other with the kind of gleeful commitment usually reserved for last drinks. “Alright, you know what to do,” Armstrong said, watching the gap form again.
A DJ scratch solo from Hahn then bled into a Bollywood-influenced guitar section, before Shinoda took the mic for some crowd work. “Brisbane you’re beautiful. What’s up fellas? Brissy, how ya goin’?” he offered, in an Australian accent that landed somewhere closer to English. A signed hat went into the crowd at the barrier.
The closing stretch — “Numb”, “In the End”, a lung-shredding “Faint” — arrived with the weight of songs that have meant something to too many people for too long to ever feel routine. The encore brought “Papercut”, “Heavy Is the Crown”, and finally “Bleed It Out”, extended with a Fort Minor verse buried in the bridge, closing the night in a breathless, confetti-dusted blur.
“It’s been a long time for us to come back to Brisbane,” Shinoda said before the final song. “Hopefully it doesn’t take us as long to come back next time.”
Australia will definitely be holding him to that.
Check out Linkin Park’s remaining Australian tour dates here.
From Rolling Stone AU/NZ
