Linkin Park founder Mike Shinoda defends new vocalist Emily Armstrong amid criticism

He says she was not brought in to replace the late Chester Bennington and it was “intended to be a new chapter.”

Linkin Park founder Mike Shinoda has stressed that the band's new singer Emily Armstrong is not trying to replace late original frontman Chester Bennington.

The Papercut rockers announced their return earlier this month following a seven-year hiatus after Bennington took his own life in 2017 but the musician insists that the band will not be "rewritten" following heavy criticism of the move to put Armstrong front and centre.

Shinoda told BBC Radio 1's New Music Show: "This is intended to be a new chapter of Linkin Park.

"The old chapter was a great chapter and we loved that chapter. It ran its course and now we were faced with a challenge of: 'Well okay, if you start from scratch with another voice, what do you do?'"

Shinoda explained that he had been writing music with Dead Sara singer Armstrong since 2019 and that they never planned to "start the band up again".

The 47-year-old rocker said: "We were just slowly coming together and then eventually things just started to fall into place with Emily and with Colin (Brittain) our new drummer.

"We talked about putting her voice on things we'd already written that only had my voice on them.

"Once we did that, we were like, 'that sounds really good, we should try that on even more songs'."

The decision to let Armstrong join the band has been criticised by Bennington's family, with his mother Susan Eubanks stating that she felt "betrayed" by the group's new line-up.

She wrote in an essay for Rolling Stone magazine: "I feel betrayed. They told me that if they were ever going to do something, they would let me know. They didn’t let me know, and they probably knew that I [wasn’t] going to be very happy. I’m very upset about it."