Linkin Park - One More Light album review

Removing the ‘metal’ from ‘nu metal’

By
( )
published
Cover art for Linkin Park - One More Light album

You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

Since their debut album Hybrid Theory turned them into overnight superstars, Linkin Park have bounced from style to style like a pissed tramp staggering between park bins. They love guitars! They hate guitars! They think they’re Depeche Mode! They’ve made an album of Ukranian arse flute music!

One More Light is their latest career flip-flop: a gleaming, featherweight 21st-century pop album. They’ve stripped away the guitars to the point where only trace elements remain. Good Goodbye (featuring rapper Pusha T and grime star Stormzy) and Heavy (a soft-centred duet with US singer Kiiara) are more Radio 1’s Big Weekend than Download. The whole thing makes Ed Sheeran sound like Extreme Noise Terror.

There’s no point getting annoyed about it. With One More Light, Linkin Park have waved goodbye to rock. All the best, lads. It was nice-ish while it lasted.

Linkin Park tell fans to “move the f*** on” from Hybrid Theory

The internet reacts to the new Linkin Park song

Nine things we learned from Linkin Park's intimate unplugged session

Dave Everley
Dave Everley

Dave Everley has been writing about and occasionally humming along to music since the early 90s. During that time, he has been Deputy Editor on Kerrang! and Classic Rock, Associate Editor on Q magazine and staff writer/tea boy on Raw, not necessarily in that order. He has written for Metal Hammer, Louder, Prog, the Observer, Select, Mojo, the Evening Standard and the totally legendary Ultrakill. He is still waiting for Billy Gibbons to send him a bottle of hot sauce he was promised several years ago.