What Emily Armstrong thinks of Linkin Park’s debut album

Even before becoming the new singer of Linkin Park, Emily Armstrong has always been a longtime fan of the band once led by Chester Bennington. Long before getting on stage next to Mike Shinoda and his companions to sing in front of thousands of people those songs that had accompanied her for years, Armstrong was a little girl who discovered the band’s music like millions of other fans of his generation.

Previously known to a limited audience as the frontwoman of Los Angeles’ Dead Sara, Emily Armstrong experienced fame starting in 2024when she was chosen by Linkin Park for their comeback seven years after Bennington’s tragic death. In an interview with Zach Sang shortly after joining the band, the singer talked about how “Hybrid theory”, the historic debut album of the historic band released in October 2000, profoundly marked her adolescence. During the chat Armstrong said that the record entered her life when she was little more than a preteen and immediately became a reference listen.

“’One step closer’ meant a lot to me,” Emily recalled – as witnessed in the video above from minute 8: “That scream, or rather, not really a scream, but that ‘Shut up when I’m talking to you!’ it made me think, ‘Oh my God. I found my motto for my teenage angst‘. I had maybe twelve years and I thought, ‘This is it. This is exactly it.’” For this reason, the singer underlined in the interview, the impact of the entire album was such that it also directly influenced her musical path: “I was completely obsessed with that album. At that time I was starting to play in a band and I thought: ‘This is what I want to do. This is how I want to sing,’” Armstrong explained: “If he could sing and scream at the same time, that was great to me. Only later did I realize that there are actually many who know how to do it!”. Years later, that youthful passion has transformed into something unthinkable: Armstrong today finds himself performing those very songs on stage with Linkin Park, inheriting a role that for a long time seemed impossible to imagine after Bennington’s death in 2017.

Together with the band, whose return was marked by the album “From scratch” (here is our review), Emily found herself catapulted onto stages all over the world on the occasion of world tour who also visited Italy last year (here is our story of the concert in Milan) and who is currently stopping in New Zealand before returning to Europe. It is scheduled for next summer a new date in our country scheduled for June 26, 2026 at the Visarno Arena in Florence.