Wastelands

Linkin Park formed in Agoura Hills, California in 1996. They were called Xero, then Hybrid Theory, and finally settled on a name inspired by Lincoln Park in Santa Monica, where Chester Bennington had been living out of his car during the years the band spent being rejected by every major label they approached. The spelling became "Linkin" so they could register the domain. The park itself is a modest neighborhood green space on the west side of Los Angeles, carrying no particular history of its own. Or almost none. It has attracted persistent internet theories about CIA experimentation that have never been supported by any documentary evidence, theories that say more about the American relationship to documented government misconduct than they do about that specific patch of grass. The real MKUltra program, confirmed by declassified documents and congressional testimony, ran from 1953 to approximately 1973 across universities, hospitals, and safe houses including documented sites in San Francisco. The Lincoln Park connection is not among them.

By 2014 Linkin Park had spent two albums exploring electronic textures and losing some of the audience that came for the heavy guitar sound of Hybrid Theory and Meteora. Mike Shinoda described The Hunting Party as "just a rock record" and "a statement against bands trying to be other bands and playing it safe." Recorded at Larrabee Studios in Van Nuys, EastWest Studios in Hollywood, and Glenwood Place Studios in Los Angeles between May 2013 and April 2014, self-produced by Shinoda and Brad Delson, the album brought in Page Hamilton of Helmet, Daron Malakian of System of a Down, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, and Rakim as collaborators. It debuted at number 3 on the Billboard 200, the first Linkin Park album not to open at number one since their debut.

Wastelands, released June 2, 2014, is track six on the album, co-produced by Shinoda, Delson, and Rob Cavallo. It runs three minutes and fifteen seconds and does what The Hunting Party set out to do: Bennington and Shinoda trading verses over a riff that has no interest in radio. Bennington died on July 20, 2017. His catalog has never left the charts. The word "wastelands" names a condition as much as a place, which is why it keeps appearing in the titles of records that want to describe where they find themselves. The park the band named itself after turns out to be less interesting than the story of a group of kids from the suburbs sleeping in cars and recording demos and getting rejected and starting over, until they weren't starting over anymore.