Linkin Park Release the Unheard ‘Friendly Fire,’ Announce New Singles Compilation
Linkin Park have officially released "Friendly Fire," a previously unheard One More Light-era song from 2017 that features lead vocals from the late Chester Bennington.
The band began teasing the song earlier this week after Linkin Park's social media outposts, YouTube channel and Spotify tracks started displaying a distinct green shade as a cryptic clue. A 30-second preview of "Friendly Fire" then arrived. Now, Linkin Park fans can listen to the entire song and watch its music video.
Hear "Friendly Fire" near the bottom of this post.
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In tandem with the song's arrival, Linkin Park announced a forthcoming singles compilation, the career-spanning Papercuts (Singles Collection 2000–2023, to be released April 12.
Speaking on "Friendly Fire" in 2020, Linkin Park's Mike Shinoda said, "There was a song, a One More Light song that we mixed. We mixed more than the finished album, and we mixed a couple other songs just to see if one of them would make the cut, or if we would use it for a B-side."
Despite the surviving members of Linkin Park not performing together publicly since Bennington's tribute concert following his 2017 death, the band hasn't been dormant.
They spent the bulk of 2023 celebrating their influential second album, 2003's Meteora, with an anniversary reissue of the effort that include the previously unreleased "Lost."
In 2020, the band released a 20th-anniversary edition of their watershed 2000 debut, Hybrid Theory. The bonus content includes previously released B-sides and live songs plus unheard demos and other material from the era that arrived for the first time on the reissue.
Linkin Park, "Friendly Fire" (Music Video)
Linkin Park, Papercuts Album Art + Tracklist
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"
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Gallery Credit: Philip Trapp + Chad Childers