one more light
One More Light is the 7th studio album by American rock band Linkin Park. It was released on May 19, 2017 through Warner Bros. Records and Machine Shop, following the 2014 album The Hunting Party.The album's first single, "Heavy" was released on February 16, 2017. It is their first album with a title track. In deciding on the title track, they felt that the song "One More Light" was the heart of the album.
The album features guest vocal appearances from Pusha T, Stormzy, and Kiiara, and production and songwriting collaborations with Julia Michaels, Justin Tranter, Ross Golan, Andrew Goldstein, blackbear, and Eg White.
Acoustic performances of the lead single by Chester Bennington and Mike Shinoda helped promote One More Light. A few of them included performances with Kiiara, Waxx, and Sofia Karlberg.
background
In 2014, Linkin Park released their sixth studio album The Hunting Party. The album, produced by Mike Shinoda and Brad Delson, marked a shift from the electronic rock sound in their previous albums produced with help of Rick Rubin. The pre-production of One More Light began in mid-2015 during The Hunting Party Tour by Shinoda on his phone.
The main production began as soon as the tour ended. In the process, the band decided to write songs with some external help. They worked with Zayed Hassan, which resulted in his song "Sailing Through the Clouds", Martin Garrix,Hot Karl, Mike Baczor of the band Her0, The Lonely Island, which resulted in "Things in My Jeep", and One Ok Rock.
None of these collaborations, however, made the final version of the album. The album marks the second to be self-produced following The Hunting Party.
composition
As a new concept to the band, all the songs featured on the album began with vocals being recorded first. They worked on the story first, then the hook, and finally the music. In an interview with Zane Lowe, Shinoda explained the composition as, "In terms of the style of the record, it's one of the most diverse stylistically, there's more genres mashed into this album than anything we've ever put out. You don't hear a lot of super heavy guitars. There isn't any screaming on the record." He adds, "To some extent it is a very polished record. Stylistically we wanted to blend all of the sound and genres together in a way you can’t tell them apart".
As to why they chose "Heavy" to present the album to the world, he told Billboard, "One of the reasons why we chose 'Heavy' as the first single is because it is really the core sound of the album. This wasn't a scenario where the whole album sounds one way and the single sounds different.
This is how the album sounds. So we wanted to go out with a song like that, where everybody can get a sense of the direction of this body of work." According to him, a lot of songs on the album can make the listener think of old songs by The Cure or Tears For Fears.
In an interview with MusicRadar Brad Delson explained,
“I wound up putting a lot of guitar on this album. There’s a lot of layers and a lot of different guitars. The guitar work is nuanced and complementary to all of the other elements that we have put in there. I find guitar to be a dominant ingredient in any soup. The minute I put loud heavy guitars into an arrangement, I feel like it is a heavy colour. One of the goals of the production of this album was to do away with any notion of genre. We were looking at ways to juxtapose influences that we have in ways that you haven’t heard before. Building the guitar work into that was a fun challenge. I love the guitar work and tones that our engineer Ethan helped create with me and Mike [Shinoda] throughout this album. Even though you don’t hear guitar in the foreground in a heavy-handed way, there really is a ton of guitar on this album, and I’m really proud of it.”
recording
The band had been writing and recording mostly in Los Angeles but also had a few sessions in London and Canada where they worked with a few songwriters.In Los Angeles, the band started working at the Larrabee Studios where they had worked for their previous album. After noticing the band needed a bit more space they shifted to Sphere Studios.Starting in the early 2016 the band decided, for the first time, to open up their process to fans through social media by doing live streams, posting pictures and videos of their day by day in the studio, and sending studio updates to their mailing list.
In an interview with Billboard, Shinoda said "We've focused almost exclusively on songwriting, not on sound, not on genre, not on arrangement, on words and melodies. And that is something Rick [Rubin] has always told us to do years past and we never listened because we started always track first. Now we're writing songs and now we’re just starting to get into the style of that." While working with Justin Parker in London, Mike also learned a different approach to songwriting: to write without any sound in mind and, instead, write with meaning in mind. Instead of writing tracks piece by piece, the band wouldn't leave a session without having a song. It would all start as a conversation, and out of those the songs would build progressively from a chord progression to lyrics.
In a promotional teaser, Shinoda said:
"The one thing that I am super excited about, I really wanna like make the riskiest songs now, because I feel like we're at the point where it's like, "okay, we've handled so many things" and risky could be a lot of different kinds of risky. Risky could mean the most weirdest, the weirdest thing, weirdest chord progressions or whatever, or could be the poppiest thing that comes to mind. That we just got like we made that work like it sounds like us, it doesn't sound weird, it sounds like very cool, and I wanna make some songs where you go like "holy shit" That's where we gotta find that. ”
— Mike Shinoda
RECEPTION
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Aggregate scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AnyDecentMusic? | 4.0/10 |
| Metacritic | 46/100 |
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |
  
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| Classic Rock Magazine |
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| Consequence of Sound | D+ |
| London Evening Standard |
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| Newsday | B+ |
| NME |
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| Rock Sound | 6/10 |
At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album has an average score of 46 out of 100 based on 7 reviews, which indicates "mixed or average" reviews. NME criticized the album's quality, giving it a 2/10 score and concluding that "It’s harsh to criticise a great band for trying something different, and it’s not an issue that this is a pop album. The issue is that it’s weak and contrived commercial move (perhaps to compete with the likes of Twenty One Pilots)". Neil Z. Yeung of AllMusic agreed, stating that "The issue isn't that it's a pop effort; indeed, they get points for a brave attempt so outside of their wheelhouse. The problem is that much of One More Light is devoid of that visceral charge that previously defined much of their catalog... there's no feral screaming from Chester Bennington, there are barely any riffs, and DJ Hahn has disappeared beneath the textured studio sheen." Team Rock criticized the move away from rock music, stating that the album "makes Ed Sheeran sound like Extreme Noise Terror...With One More Light, Linkin Park have waved goodbye to rock."Troy L. Smith at The Plain Dealer described "Invisible" and "Nobody Can Save Me" as "well-rounded pop songs," but also noting "That won't stop Linkin Park diehards from getting a sweet tooth from the whiny "Halfway Right" or the boring title track. Heck, even Skrillex-like EDM can't save "Sorry for Now" from corny territory." Consequence of Sound criticized the album for sounding like it was trying to "chase the trend of pop-EDM in an attempt to capitalize on its ubiquity" and sound "as if they were selected by committee", leading the album to sound like "a muddled mess of a record from a band that completely abandoned any sense of identity".
Newsday gave the album a B+ and praised the band's new direction, comparing it to the works of Coldplay and Owl City and concluding "One More Light shows how well Linkin Park has absorbed the current pop scene and applied it to their own music to genuinely reflect who they are today, not who some fans want them to be."
BAND RESPONSE
The band, specifically frontman Chester Bennington, have lashed out in response to the negative reception of One More Light's material. As documented through Spin magazine, in an interview with Music Week, Bennington, at the accusations that the band had "sold out", suggested that those people should "stab [themselves] in the face" and "move the fuck on" from the band's past sound. Similarly, in a separate interview with Kerrang, Bennington, in response to claims of selling out with the album, responded "I will punch you in your fucking mouth ... You're a fucking pussy." In the same interview, Mike Shinoda also rejected the claims that they had made the album "for monetary reasons", responding that "That's not how I operate". Bennington explained that the accusation of "selling out" angers him because he sees it as a personal attack, concluding that "when you make it personal, like a personal attack against who we are as people, like, dude, shut up. That means that I can actually have feelings about it and most of the time my feelings are 'I want to kill you.'"
In response to the comments, Slipknot and Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor stated that he understood Bennington's frustrations, but advised him to "be fortunate for what you have, be fortunate for that fact that people are still coming to see you to hear the music. Give it a little time, you have to give it a little time." Bennington later responded that he agreed with Taylor's statements, saying:
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