Mike Shinoda compares Linkin Park albums to food in ‘Last Meals’ appearance

Linkin Park‘s Mike Shinoda guests on the latest episode of the YouTube series Last Meals.

Produced by the channel Mythical Kitchen, Last Meals asks its guests, as its title suggests, to share what they’d want to eat for their last meal on Earth.

In between that, Shinoda also compares Linkin Park albums to different foods, sharing that he and his bandmates often use food analogies to describe their music.

“Our first album, Hybrid Theory, we had all these different sonic elements that we loved,” Shinoda explains. “We wanted to put them together in a way that they meshed, like it was hard to tell one element from another, and they were blended.”

Fast-forward to LP’s third album, 2007’s Minutes to Midnight, and Shinoda says that the band’s approach was more focused on “[taking] those sonic elements and make them a little more visible,” adding they wanted the listener to “hear the references or the inspirations.”

“So on Hybrid Theory, all of the elements were sitting combined with each other like a smoothie, like a soup,” Shinoda says. “By the time you got to Minutes to Midnight, it was more like a salad or even like a sandwich. You can see how the elements are stacked.”

As for what food analogy he’d use for Linkin Park’s new album, From Zero, Shinoda compares it to a Japanese omakase meal.

“We really chose very specific [songs],” Shinoda says of From Zero. “This one is more of a greatest hits kind of DNA of the band.”

From Zero, Linkin Park’s first new album since the 2017 death of frontman Chester Bennington and their first with new vocalist Emily Armstrong, dropped in November. Linkin Park will launch a U.S. tour in support of the record in April.

Linkin Park‘s Mike Shinoda guests on the latest episode of the YouTube series Last Meals.

Produced by the channel Mythical Kitchen, Last Meals asks its guests, as its title suggests, to share what they’d want to eat for their last meal on Earth.

In between that, Shinoda also compares Linkin Park albums to different foods, sharing that he and his bandmates often use food analogies to describe their music.

“Our first album, Hybrid Theory, we had all these different sonic elements that we loved,” Shinoda explains. “We wanted to put them together in a way that they meshed, like it was hard to tell one element from another, and they were blended.”

Fast-forward to LP’s third album, 2007’s Minutes to Midnight, and Shinoda says that the band’s approach was more focused on “[taking] those sonic elements and make them a little more visible,” adding they wanted the listener to “hear the references or the inspirations.”

“So on Hybrid Theory, all of the elements were sitting combined with each other like a smoothie, like a soup,” Shinoda says. “By the time you got to Minutes to Midnight, it was more like a salad or even like a sandwich. You can see how the elements are stacked.”

As for what food analogy he’d use for Linkin Park’s new album, From Zero, Shinoda compares it to a Japanese omakase meal.

“We really chose very specific [songs],” Shinoda says of From Zero. “This one is more of a greatest hits kind of DNA of the band.”

From Zero, Linkin Park’s first new album since the 2017 death of frontman Chester Bennington and their first with new vocalist Emily Armstrong, dropped in November. Linkin Park will launch a U.S. tour in support of the record in April.