Linkin Park will be dropping a never-before-heard song, "Friendly Fire", featuring the late Chester Bennington.
The band shared a teaser of the synthpop-inspired track on their social media, adding that the song was taken from the band’s sessions for their last album, ‘One More Light’, which was released just two months before Bennington’s death by suicide in 2017.
The snippet, which appears to be the chorus, features the lines: “We’re falling apart for no reason/We’re pulling the trigger in a useless war/If we go back and go into the black/What are we fighting for?/What are we fighting?/It’s just friendly fire.”
It has not yet been confirmed when the track will be released.
The existence of "Friendly Fire" was first mentioned by Shinoda back in 2020. “We mixed more [songs] than [are on] the finished album and we mixed a couple [of] 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’,” he said (via AltPress).
After sharing that the song was co-written by ‘One More Light’ collaborator Jon Green, Shinoda added: “I still love that song. Is that out somewhere? Did we put ‘Friendly Fire’ out at some point? We didn’t, did we?”
Fans proceeded to ask Shinoda to put the unreleased song out, to which he replied: “You literally are going to have to wait years to hear that song FYI.”
Speaking to NME in November, Shinoda commented on the future of Linkin Park, confirming that there was “nothing planned right now”.
“I always just tell people like when there’s news I’ll give you the news. We’ve been doing it for a while and I think our expectation for what’s a proper reissue is kind of high.
“I don’t love putting out Greatest Hits stuff or putting out re-masters of things we’ve done, [so] if we were to do a re-reissue of one of our Linkin Park albums, we want it to be a big deal. If we can’t make it that quality then we won’t do it. If it’s not great then I don’t think we should do it.”
Last month, Shinoda also admitted that he wanted success for Linkin Park “without being recognisable”.
“Fame was never a priority. But it happened,” wrote Shinoda in a piece for The Guardian , before stating that he and Chester Bennington did not want to be seen as the faces of Linkin Park.
“If the photographer had it their way, it would just be Chester, or me and Chester, but we wanted people to know that this band was all of us, not just the singers at the front,” he added. “Linkin Park being well known or well regarded was a blessing, but would I have wanted the band to be successful without being recognisable? Probably. The fame aspect of my career always felt odd.”
