“You’ll hear him say everything from, ‘I never wanted it to be a single’ to ‘I hated the song’”: The huge Linkin Park hit that Chester Bennington didn’t even want on Hybrid Theory

Linkin Park posing for a photograph in 2000.

It’s 2020 and Mike Shinoda is considering the impact and legacy of Linkin Park’s 20-million-selling debut album, Hybrid Theory, on its 20th anniversary. “At the time, if you asked somebody what they were listening to they’d say, ‘I listen to Rock. ‘I listen to hip hop.’ ‘I listen to jazz’,” he tells Metal Hammer. “It wasn’t until five years later they’d say, ‘Everything’. [Hybrid Theory] did some of that work. It was part of the progression towards breaking down boundaries between styles of music.”

These days, genre-hopping is standard practice for the average band. But when Linkin Park dropped the album on 24 October 2000, their sound was genuinely fresh and innovative, blending neck snapping metal, sharp rap, electronics and bouncing pop choruses into an unabashed commercial proposition that captured both the zeitgeist and the future.