Linkin Park On 'From Zero' & Their Return To Australia: 'We're More Assured That This Is What We Want To Be Doing'

In the lead-up to their first Australian shows in 13 years, Linkin Park bassist Dave "Phoenix" Farrell reflects on incredible moments Down Under and the band's momentous return with 'From Zero.'

Linkin Park

In just under two months, Linkin Park will return to Australia for the first time in thirteen years.

Indeed, one day off from thirteen years to the day, the last time Linkin Park performed Down Under, they appeared on the legendary Soundwave Festival 2013 bill, sharing the stage with the likes of Metallica, blink-182, Slayer, and Paramore, to name a few of the massive acts who performed that year.

“We've played shows in Australia where the fans are just so fun and into it and [they’re so] loud and energetic,” says bassist Dave “Phoenix” Farrell, who Zooms with The Music ahead of the nu-metal act’s upcoming Australian tour.

“Mike [Shinoda] loves the story of one of the first times we played there, the fans were jumping so much on this floor,” Farrell muses, “It was in an amphitheatre, maybe? No, it was in a theatre that they broke the floor of the venue! It was one of those things where we saw it collapse.”

On a Wednesday night in May 2001, Linkin Park fans did break the floor of the venue—Sydney’s Enmore Theatre. At the time, the band’s co-vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and producer, Mike Shinoda, shared a tour diary reflecting on the wild rock-and-roll moment.

Describing those early Australian shows as “bananas,” Shinoda commented that it was safe to say a show went well when “the kids leave behind them a BROKEN CLUB FLOOR.”

“When everyone cleared out of the enmore theatre in sydney, there was a 20-foot circle where the floor had been smashed down about 18 lower than where it was supposed to be,” Shinoda continued. “The crowd was so out of hand that they broke the floor. and tonight in melbourne, we had the biggest turnout that we've had on a headlining show. we can't wait to see what happens in brisbane.”

Reflecting on the incident, Farrell is thankful that no one was hurt and that the show continued. “That was great. But at the end of it, we're kind of like, ‘How does that work? Are we responsible for breaking the venue?’ Don’t know how that ever got figured out… but Australians, they bring a fun energy to the music environment, and that makes it that much more enjoyable for us.”

Formed in 1996, Linkin Park experienced their mainstream breakout quickly: upon the release of their 2000 debut album, Hybrid Theory, the world was introduced to the band through timeless hits like In The End and Crawling. That full-length, and its follow-up, 2003’s Meteora—the first to feature Farrell on bass—fused heavy metal and rap so spectacularly and successfully that the title nu-metal could be taken seriously.

As their career progressed, Linkin Park pursued more experimental ventures. Even before Meteora’s release, they remixed well-known tracks on the collaborative effort, the monstrous Reanimation. On 2007’s Minutes To Midnight, they traded ear-shattering riffs and themes of depression and recovery for anthemic rock and universal lyrics.

2010’s A Thousand Suns saw the band reborn, releasing a concept album that explored fears of nuclear warfare. In addition to the larger-than-life songwriting, A Thousand Suns is Linkin Park at their most experimental, blending electronica, industrial rock, and art rock together for a seamless, at the time divisive, unforgettable album.

2012’s LIVING THINGS followed in the footsteps of its predecessor, while bringing back the band’s signature rap-metal fusion and featuring some of the band’s most touching, tender moments (BURN IT DOWN and CASTLE OF GLASS come to mind). The punk-focused The Hunting Party arrived in 2014 and marked the first time Linkin Park collaborated with other artists on a studio album: Helmet’s Page Hamilton, System Of A Down’s Daron Malakian, Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello, and hip hop legend Rakim all featured.

The band’s seventh album, One More Light, was released in 2017. The record was the most overtly “pop” piece of art they released, starring special guests Pusha T, Stormzy, and Kiiara. It’s also the most devastating album Linkin Park ever released, and was followed by a lengthy hiatus.

For a long time, fans couldn’t imagine another Linkin Park tour, let alone in Australia. Between 2001 and 2013, they embarked on an Australian club tour, three arena tours, and appeared on the Soundwave and Livid (2003) festival bills.

But in July 2017, tragedy struck. Following the shock passing of their beloved lead vocalist, Chester Bennington, who traded screams and sang alongside Mike Shinoda’s raps, Linkin Park effectively went on hiatus. Bennington passed away two months after the release of One More Light.

The band swiftly cancelled their North American tour, and in August 2017, announced a tribute concert for Bennington that would take place in Los Angeles. Linkin Park And Friends: Celebrate Life In Honour Of Chester Bennington took place in October 2017 at the Hollywood Bowl, where the group’s surviving members were joined by members of blink-182, System Of A Down, Korn, Sum 41, Bring Me The Horizon, and many others. The concert lasted for three hours.

No sign of Linkin Park returning to the spotlight eventuated until early September 2024. After launching a mysterious countdown on their website, the band didn’t just announce that they’d reunited and found a new vocalist, but they also announced a new album and a short run of arena shows.

From Zero, Linkin Park’s first studio album in seven years, was released on 15 November 2024. A reference to the band’s original name, Xero, the group mined sounds and vibes of the past while looking to the future.

With a throwback to the band’s iconic, hard-hitting heavy sound – new vocalist Emily Armstrong has guttural screams to accompany a beautiful singing voice – packed with down-tuned riffs, pounding drums, and abrasive (in the best way) spins on the turntable, Linkin Park made it clear that they were back, their melodic hard rock sound as familiar yet surprising as ever.

The From Zero World Tour began in September 2024. Following the nine-date global run in 2024, the tour grew immensely. Last year, the band played in Mexico, Japan, Indonesia, the United States, and Europe. This year is just as busy, and marks Linkin Park’s first Australian shows since 2013.

“Well, the first show we did, which was the launch event we did for the fan club and then the online [performance], everything about it felt so different and foreign from what a normal show would feel like,” Farrell recalls.

“For me, I’d gone into this place, it was almost probably a defence mechanism, but I’d gone to this place where it just felt small. Like, ‘Oh, no one’s watching this. This is not that big of a deal.’ And then after the fact, I had this huge physical reaction to that, not to go into details, but it was just this almost, like, being sick, but I knew I wasn’t sick. I knew it was just all the stress that I hadn’t been dealing with.”

After feeling “shut down” for a few days, Farrell grew more accustomed to returning to the stage as touring became more consistent. “It was such a weird pacing early on,” he admits. “It was just the opposite of what touring normally feels like, where you can get into a rhythm or a flow, that it all felt a little surreal and different.”

“At this stage now, touring has started to feel more normal, kind of a good rhythm to it, a good pacing to it. It’s felt great and exciting, I think, the whole last year and a half. But at this point, I think everything we’re doing is just a little bit more dialled in and cohesive.”

Reflecting on the “tightrope act” that goes into touring, Farrell notes that when he’s locked in and playing well. “You always feel like you’re playing the best show that you could play in that moment,” he says, and as the gigs continue, the aim is to keep enjoying the touring life and avoid burnout, especially as the shows get looser.

He adds, “There’s this little tightrope act of touring for me: I don’t want to get to a stage where I’m not fully enjoying it or that I don’t have the energy for it to be the best show we can play. There's a little bit of a tightrope there to walk, but I think for the most part, we’ve done a good job with that on this touring cycle.”

The touring line-up, consisting of Emily Armstrong and Mike Shinoda, lead guitarist Alex Feder – filling in for founding member Brad Delson, who stepped down from touring – Dave Farrell on bass, Joe Hahn on turntables and samples, and drummer Colin Brittain, replacing Rob Bourdon, consistently change up the band’s setlists, not just highlighting From Zero but drawing from Linkin Park’s immense catalogue, slotting B-sides and demos alongside classics and new numbers.

Armstrong, along with Brittain, joined Linkin Park in 2023—unbeknownst to the public until the following year. But for the members of Linkin Park, they weren’t completely new. The band met Armstrong, singer of the rock band Dead Sara, in 2019, and began working on music with her shortly after, with Brittain also involved in those early writing sessions.

“We’d been working with Colin and Emily for, I don’t know, maybe a year and a half to two years before the album even came out,” Farrell shares. “So, we had a long period of time of just getting to know each other and spending time together and really enjoying our company and enjoying that time before we even relaunched the band.

“And so, this past year and a half after that has been really, really enjoyable and fun as well.”

In the early days, Armstrong and Brittain were somewhat sworn to secrecy, not daring to give up that they’d joined Linkin Park.

“It’s funny talking to Emily about that because she had a long period of time where we were spending days, months, whatever, hours in the studio writing, and we’d do dinner together and all this stuff. But she couldn’t really tell anybody who she was working with or hanging out with. Everything was still like this big secret,” Farrell says.

“She couldn't talk to the rest of her life about that; she had to keep them kind of separate. And then after the fact, after the launch show, after everything came out, for Colin as well, it was just this interesting, fun, nice relief to have the secret out and finally be able to say to friends and family, ‘Oh, this is what I’ve been telling you; this is what I’ve been working on.’ And they’re like, ‘Oh, okay, got it. Just, you know, playing with Linkin Park.’”

When discussing “one of the biggest things” Farrell, Shinoda, Hahn, and Delson love about Armstrong and Brittain, it’s simple to pin down: it’s the camaraderie feeling.

“From very early in even starting our writing, the whole process was guided by this idea of, you know, it needs to be fun, and it needs to feel right and feel good. And for whatever reason, with both Emily and Colin, they both felt like people that we had known for a long, long time. It was just a natural, easy, like synergy.”

“And not only in the ability to do things together creatively and to work, but just as friends, it was natural, simple. And so that made everything move forward that much [easier]. We’re more assured that this is what we want to be doing.”

While the band felt assured on an interpersonal level, predicting how fans would feel about the next phase of Linkin Park proved more difficult to gauge. Not only have fans – and the general public – embraced singles such as The Emptiness Machine and Heavy Is The Crown, but they also memorised standout numbers like IGYEIH and Good Things Go.

“I didn’t know what to expect. And I really was trying,” Farrell admits. “I mean, to be honest, there were so many moving parts and so much stuff happening so quickly that I didn’t have a lot of time that I could spend trying to figure out what I was expecting.

“Having said that, I would have never expected new music to be as embraced as much as it would be by our fan base or by our community. That's crazy.”

Pointing to another band that’s currently experiencing a resurgence and at the height of their powers – Deftones – Farrell previously believed that fans accepting late-period albums, with the challenge of new band members, “doesn’t happen.”

He explains, “I wasn’t even thinking like, ‘Oh, we might get a spot where if we only play five new songs instead of six on a particular night, then you go online, and people would be like, ‘Why aren’t they playing more new stuff now? I never even thought of that as, ‘Oh, that might happen.’ It just didn’t even pop into my head.”

“When you do a new album, you always want to play new songs, and you want to get as many of them into the set as you can at some point. And at the same time, you don’t want to almost wear out the welcome of your audience, having to listen to stuff they might not be familiar with or interested in.”

“You’re always going to have some fans who are excited about everything, but the majority usually is not. I think that’s normal and totally fine. But with this, for whatever reason, it’s always felt like From Zero has been largely met with open arms. I think that’s really cool and exciting, and it was something I was pleasantly surprised by throughout the process. And not just The Emptiness Machine and, you know, a couple of songs, it's been almost every song on the album. The whole record, yeah.”

It's a sign of how much fans have missed and adored Linkin Park. Actually, adore, Linkin Park. It’s a response the band has also seen with their return to the stage, and Australian fans are no different.

After announcing three shows in Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane last August, the tour has expanded: there are now two nights in those cities – at arena venues – and in December, they added an Adelaide date. With Sydney metalcore heavyweights Polaris set to warm up audiences on the Australian leg of the From Zero tour, it’s one of the year’s first unmissable gigs.

Looking back on the band’s long-running love affair with Australia, Farrell shares “the funniest thing” he remembers from the times they’ve visited. “It’s not necessarily even about playing in Australia, but I think [one of] the first times we came down there was in 2003, and Mike and I, we’d come down a bit earlier because in 2003, we brought our wives down.

“I don’t remember the exact timing of it, but the point was: we loved Australia so much. We went to the Rugby World Cup. We drove all around the coast. We did these outback tours in these huge, crazy trucks that were like old Australian mining vehicles. We did all this really fun stuff.

“And by the end of our tour that first time down, Brad and I, I remember we were talking about like, ‘We should look into buying a condo or something down here. It'd be such an awesome place to come back to.’ We had checked, just for fun, and randomly, we had checked these condos that were right there on the Sydney Harbour with a view of the Opera House.”

Farrell continues, “And at that point, we’re like, ‘Oh, they’re expensive. It doesn’t make a ton of sense, but wow, it’d be really cool to have one of these.’ And then, the next time we came back, it was the combination of the US dollar having gotten so much weaker and the Australian real estate market having gotten so much stronger.”

“We were like, ‘We’re such idiots for not figuring out a way to buy this condo that we liked! We’re so stupid!’ Like, we could have absolutely enjoyed that.”

“But all that is just to say, from the first time I’ve ever been in Australia, there’s something that feels familiar to me, specifically about Sydney, but in general, about the entire East Coast. It feels similar in a lot of ways to California.

“Even if Sydney feels similar to LA, then as you go down into Melbourne, that feels more like the Pacific Northwest or San Francisco or even Seattle and stuff. It’s very easy for me to feel like I’m at home down there. And for that reason, it’s always felt very special. And on top of that, then you get to play a show, right? So, it’s already an incredible place that feels so great.”

Linkin Park will tour Australia in March 2026. Tickets are available now.