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Linkin Park have made a habit out of surprising their fans and The Hunting Party is no exception. After the electronic rock of previous albums A Thousand Suns and Living Things one would expect them to travel further in that direction, especially after their last release, the remix album Recharged. Yet The Hunting Party pulls a complete 180, instead being a full-on hard rock album containing some of the heaviest riffs the band’s ever recorded. It’s what many fans have been wanting from the band for years, but is the album able to compete with their earlier work, and will fans be satisfied?

The answer ends up being both yes and no. The Hunting Party isn’t as good as Hybrid Theory or Meteora, although I’m sure few people were expecting it to be. But it does have one important factor in common with those albums; energy. Whereas Minutes to Midnight and Living Things were boring, uninspired slogs for the most part, and A Thousand Suns, while creative at times, presented Linkin Park at their most downbeat and drab, The Hunting Party immediately grabs you with its energy. Listening to it I can tell the band is having fun recording it, a welcome surprise given their last album.

It’s also important to note that the album, while heavy, isn’t exactly a return to roots for Linkin Park. Instead of returning to their nu-metal sound of the past, they present you with a different kind of heavy, one more focused on riffs than Chester Bennington’s screaming. These riffs don’t sound anything like what Linkin Park have done in the past with some songs, for example singles “Guilty All the Same” and “Rebellion” not really sounding like Linkin Park at all.

In the past, despite all their experimentation Linkin Park’s progression as a band has made sense. The Hunting Party features some familiar elements, but as a whole seems to have come out of nowhere. No doubt it’ll leave many fans scratching their heads and certainly won’t please everyone. But the best thing about the album is that it’s not trying to. Whereas Living Things was a boring compromise, fusing the song structures of their first two albums with the electronic elements of A Thousand Suns in a way that diminished the quality of both, The Hunting Party truly sounds like nothing the band have done before, nor does it sound like something any other popular rock bands are doing right now.

With that said, the album is certainly not without flaws. One of my biggest issues with it is Mike Shinoda’s rapping which is starting to get really stale. While Shinoda has never had the best flow, his rapping on the band’s earlier work was a lot more interesting to me, and although Linkin Park’s lyrics can be dumb and cheesy I did prefer him talking about personal issues. Since A Thousand Suns it seems to me as though he’s be trying to legitimise himself as a proper rapper, mainly by harking back to 90s rap and dropping references to acts like Public Enemy and Jay-Z. I tolerated this on that album, but here, although it is dialled back a bit, I’ve reached about as much as I can handle. His work on “Wastelands” is downright embarrassing, with trite lines like “This is war with no weapons/Marching with no stepping/Murder with no killing/Illing in every direction” delivered in the most generic flow possible. It’s painfully obvious why the band chose Rakim to feature on the lead single instead.

Another issue unfortunately comes from the band’s new sound and that’s that Chester simply isn’t the best fit for some of these songs. “Guilty All the Same” is a great song but is also the best example of this, the song really deserves somebody with a lower register singing it. The album also features a noticeable lack of screaming. This isn’t a problem on its own, but there are moments on the album that sound like there’s meant to be a scream but Chester simply doesn’t do it. I understand the band wanting to distance themselves from that particular kind of heavy music they made on earlier albums, but it seems like they wrote the album with screams in mind then at the last moment decided not to. It leads to many of the songs having weird moments that stick out and take you out of the album. A third problem with the vocals comes from the songs on which Shinoda sings. Mike Shinoda isn’t exactly a bad singer, and I do feel it was a good idea to let him sing, as his lower voice serves as a nice contrast to Chester’s higher register. The problem is that he just isn’t a very powerful singer at all. He sounds timid whenever he sings, and even on slower songs he just sounds quieter and nervous next to Chester.

By far the album’s biggest problem comes from a single song though. I’m not one to believe that one bad song can ruin a whole album, but in this case it certainly does knock it down a few notches. The track, “Until it’s Gone” was the second single from the album and is a ballad where Chester Bennington drops the wise and original thought that “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.”  Dear god is it bad. The track sticks out like a sore thumb on the album, and not because it’s a light song surrounded by heavy material. “Mark the Graves” is also a lighter song and fits in perfectly fine. No, the issue with this track is that it’s possibly the dullest thing Linkin Park have ever released. Sound wise it would fit in great on Minutes to Midnight, but would even bring that album down with its boring nothingness. The chorus is dull and repetitive, leading up to Chester dropping this wisdom on you as if it hasn’t been one of the most clichéd lines in music since Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi.” It really does sour the album, as it brings it to a grinding halt for four minutes. While other singles “Guilty All the Same” and “Rebellion” grew on me in time for the album’s release, I can’t see myself ever enjoying this.

The Hunting Party is no doubt flawed. On top of the issues listed above some songs, particularly the closer “A Line in the Sand” overstay their welcome. But it makes up for these issues with pure energy that can be felt as soon as the opening track “Keys to the Kingdom” hit. I’m predicting that a lot of fans will hate this album. Older fans looking for a return to roots aren’t going to get it, and never fans who prefer their electronic sound will be downright confused. But Linkin Park for the first time in years have managed to make an album that feels inspired and original, while staying fun for the most part. It’s not going to rank amongst their earlier work for me, but it is their best release since Meteora. A welcome return to form, even if it wasn’t quite what anybody expected.