Photo: James Minchin
Linkin Park's latest archival release "Friendly Fire" is here! The track was recorded during 2017's One More Light sessions, which would be the band's last album after Chester Bennington took his own life two months after its release.
The song features chilling vocals from Bennington as he sings “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."
"Friendly Fire" will be featured on a just-announced greatest hit compilation called Papercuts.
“'Friendly Fire' was always one of our favorite songs from the One More Light sessions," guitarist Brad Delson said in a statement. "Something about it wasn’t quite right so as close as it got to the finish line, we chose to set it aside for later. When we started looking for an unreleased track to include on our greatest hits collection, I was blown away by the power of the song, the power of the storytelling, the power of the vocal, the sonic landscape and I actually thought that it was closer than maybe we had realized at the time."
"We got together to work on it and connect some of the missing pieces that for whatever reason hadn’t revealed themselves during the recording of One More Light," he continued. "I can’t wait for people to hear it. It’s such a beautiful, compelling, heartbreaking, hopeful story and it really resonates with me today.”
“In the making of each Linkin Park album, I want to love and believe in each individual song completely. I hope that if any one track is heard on its own in the world, it is something I can feel proud of, and something that takes root inside the listener and becomes part of the energy that connects us," Mike Shinoda added. "Curating the tracks for Papercuts was a joy. Each song in this collection is both a singular moment on our timeline and an evolving story that is as much ours as it is yours. From our first release ‘One Step Closer’ to the brand-new ‘Friendly Fire,’ this tracklist spans all our chapters so far. Thank you for being a part of our journey. We hope you enjoy Papercuts.”
Papercuts is slated for an April 12 release and can be preordered here.
The "Friendly Fire" music video features never-before-seen studio and live footage. Watch the video and see the full Papercuts track list below.
Papercuts (Singles Collection 2000-2023) Tracklisting:
1. Crawling
2. Faint
3. Numb/Encore
4. Papercut
5. Breaking The Habit
6. In The End
7. Bleed It Out
8. Somewhere I Belong
9. Waiting For The End
10. Castle Of Glass
11. One More Light
12. Burn It Down
13. What I’ve Done
14. QWERTY
15. One Step Closer
16. New Divide
17. Leave Out All The Rest
18. Lost
19. Numb
20. Friendly Fire