Review of Linkin Park: nu-metal escapees move beyond teenage angst

 Stormzy's appearance and pop-R&B hits highlight how far the band has gone since the gloomy days of Limp Bizkit.

The nu-metal trend that plagued American music at the turn of the 2000 was abhorrent, which is largely why history has not been kind to it. It produced some of the most cack-handed, irony-free bands ever to walk the face of the Earth. It was a gloomy combination of ostentatious angst and screamed, testosterone-driven wrath (the nadir: Limp Bizkit).

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Fortunately, Californian five-piece Linkin Park completely outgrew nu-metal and evolved into something much more artistically captivating. They did this while still enjoying tremendous economic success; Hybrid Theory from 2000, which sold 30 million copies, is still the best-selling debut album of the twenty-first century.

They have released seven studio albums after 17 years, and they have gone through a wide variety of musical rethinks. Their most recent album, this year's One More Light, was co-shaped by a bevy of well-known electropop producers and has no audible remnants of attitude rap-metal in the slightest. They embraced leftfield electronics and collaborated with Jay-Z.

It is to their undeniable credit that they have reinvented themselves in this way, keeping their fiercely devoted fan base and all of the raw intensity of their live performances. Talking to Myself, the first song of tonight, is a sleek pop-R&B nugget in the vein of Justin Bieber, but flailing singer Chester Bennington, a kinetic blur of muscle and sinew, still sings it as if he's bleeding every word.

The fact that these middle-aged men no longer want to be merely a conduit for juvenile angst is great, especially in light of the fact that their acerbic, Rage Against the Machine-like debut single One Step Closer serves as a stark reminder of how basic their prior model was. When Stormzy suddenly appears on stage to scream an insolent, no longer-London rap over their most recent collaboration, Good Goodbye, it's a testament to just how far they have come. The band's own rapper, the ever grinning Mike Shinoda, blends in deftly with Chester Bennington's wild cries without coming off as obtrusive.

The main accomplishment of Linkin Park is that they are true musicians rather than ordinary amateurs, even at this late date. By the time the encore sees Bennington and Shinoda in the spotlight and singing the reflective Sharp Edges like a buff, tattooed Simon & Garfunkel, it's evident that this melancholy band are weirdly impervious to middle-age spread. The new song Battle Stations is shrill, weedy electro-slop.

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Under 250 pages, 32 captivating short classics.