Concert Reviews

Taking over for the late Chester Bennington, Armstrong knew to let Linkin Park be Linkin Park.

By Marc Hirsh

August 1, 2025 | 12:40 PM

4 minutes to read

Linkin Park, with PVRIS, at TD Garden, Boston, Thursday, July 31.

Dig into the biggest recording acts of all time and it’s unlikely that Linkin Park will come up quickly, if at all. And yet the band, which emerged in the thick of the nü-metal boom around the turn of the century, has racked up some head-spinning stats. Debut album Hybrid Theory is certified diamond, which makes it one of the biggest albums in history. Followup Meteora is tied for the ninth-best selling album of the 21st century, and the band’s total worldwide album sales push well past the 100 million mark.

Despite playing in a genre that was both critically unregarded and viewed as an anachronistic vestige of an embarrassing moment long since over, Linkin Park spent nearly two decades as a massive deal hidden in plain sight.

So the band that played the TD Garden on Thursday (and plays a second show advertised as sold out on Friday) had a great deal of ground to make up. When singer Chester Bennington died by suicide in 2017, Linkin Park quite understandably went quiet, reemerging last September with a new singer — Emily Armstrong from Dead Sara — that felt like a bold promise.

Just like the list of diamond-selling artists, the list of established bands that have replaced a male singer with a female one isn’t a long one, let alone heavy bands, let alone massively successful ones. Less than a year after Armstrong’s announcement, she’s still proving herself night by night, with every concert being a lot of fans’ first real look at her.

Linkin Park made sure that everyone got that look with a stage set up in the middle of the Garden floor, reducing the cavernous arena distances as much as possible and allowing the band to play to every direction. (At the precise midpoint of the concert, the band disappeared so that the stage crew could make quick work of rotating the entire instrument layout 180 degrees.) In opening song “Somewhere I Belong,” Armstrong and vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Mike Shinoda settled quickly into a dynamic they’d return to throughout the evening: he rapping in a conversational bellow, she flitting in and out with counterpoint before unloading her tuneful wail on the choruses.

Crucially for a newcomer, and one stepping in for a beloved, troubled lost bandmember, Armstrong never took on the role of frontperson, leaving that to Shinoda. Two songs in, she gave half of “Crawling” over to the audience possibly as an unspoken peace offering, which also made sense; they’ve been singing it for longer than she has. But she proved herself both quickly and repeatedly. Even as she could deliver a piercing shriek in songs like the snarling churn of “Two Faced” and the cut-time careen of “Given Up,” she was also capable of asserting herself with more subdued vocals like “Castle Of Glass,” which found sinuousness in its heaving thump. And in “A Place For My Head” and “Heavy Is The Crown,” she swung with ease from one extreme to the other on a dime.

Despite being the piece without which a 2025 iteration of the band would not only fall flat but simply be a crass exercise in cynicism, Armstrong knew to let Linkin Park be Linkin Park. There were plenty of buzzing grinds to be heard, from the ominous fanfare with which the band set the concert’s tone to the fast, kicky bounce of “Faint,” but plenty of songs offered subtleties both in their instrumentation and in their emotional spectrum.

The fatalism of “In The End” had subtleties that didn’t simply whack the audience over the head, while “Waiting For The End” was a big heartburst. And with Colin Brittain providing an urgent drumbeat, Armstrong’s chant of “Lift me up, let me go” gave the arm-waving, phone-light-swaying “The Catalyst” a lightness even as it grew heavier.

And for a band that took the seemingly indiscriminate anger that seemed to infect its nü-metal brethren and pointed the finger squarely at themselves, Linkin Park seemed positively joyous pounding out its anthems of disaffection. Shinoda was a joyful host, making a fair bit of hay with a Boston-accented “Linkin Pahk,” and if his amiably awkward raps were the most dated aspect of the band’s entire approach, they leaned harder towards the “amiable” side. And with the energetic and energizing “Bleed It Out” — riding out a backbone of high-tension wire guitar cranked out by Alex Feder — the band closed out with what felt very much like a triumphant cry. The new Linkin Park had earned it just as much as the old one had.

Lowell’s PVRIS opened with a familiar churn-and-pound, cut effectively with a voice by Lynn Gunn that carried a catch in it. A few songs resembled Evanescence with the goth imperiousness swapped out for relatability, with a hitch underneath them that provided an appealing kick.

Setlist for Linkin Park at TD Garden, July 31, 2025

• Somewhere I Belong
• Crawling
• Cut The Bridge
• Lying From You
• The Emptiness Machine
• The Catalyst
• Burn It Down
• Up From The Bottom
• Where’d You Go (Fort Minor cover)
• Waiting For The End
• Castle Of Glass
• Two Faced
• When They Come For Me
• Lift Off (Mike Shinoda cover)
• Remember The Name (Fort Minor cover)
• Given Up
• One Step Closer
• Lost
• Good Things Go
• What I’ve Done
• One (Metallica cover)
• Overflow
• Numb/Encore (Jay-Z & Linkin Park cover)
• Numb
• In The End
• Faint

ENCORE:

• Papercut
• A Place For My Head
• Heavy Is The Crown
• Bleed It Out

Marc Hirsh can be reached at [email protected] or on Bluesky @spacecitymarc.bsky.social.

Marc Hirsh

Music Critic

Marc Hirsh is a music critic who covers a wide variety of genres, including pop, rock, hip-hop, country and jazz.

Source