Chester Bennington talked to Vicki Anderson for Stuff.co.nz about The Hunting Party:

Linkin Park frontman Chester Bennington tells Vicki Anderson why he wants to punch things and how rapper Rakim ended up on their new album.

Linkin Park lead vocalist Chester Bennington is yelling. It is something of a default setting.

“Music has to have energy,” he cries. “It has to make me go punch things in the groin and make me happy to do it.”

There’s a brief pause before he yells off into the distance: “I wanna f…ing punch things.”

Bennington is good-natured but worked up over what he perceives to be a global shortage of “interesting” music.

“There are vast numbers of indie pop bands out there who claim to be alternative but really are just pop,” he fumes. “We don’t want to contribute to this.”

He is also displeased by current hard-rock bands.

“These guys are singing about drinking and f…ing and good old times and it sounds like country music but with guitars. It pisses me off. . . . When we want to hear good hard music we’ve had to go back to the archives and dig them out. We wanted to make a record that would inspire the young versions of ourselves to go and pick up an instrument and do that.”

Linkin Park, the rock band from Southern California, has won two Grammy Awards and sold 60 million albums since releasing its debut Hybrid Theory, in 2000.

Bennington says the band has gone back to its rock roots on new album The Hunting Party.

“We have made the last few records, really going out and pushing things for ourselves creatively,” Bennington says

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