This song tells me Chester is going through depression and instead of getting actual help or therapy he started a band to get all his feelings out not a bad thing, and I understand that "we all have our own horrors and our demons to fight", but Chester actually bit the bullet, so I'm kind of split on whether or not I want to be a fan of this band. You start a metal or metalcore band because that's who you are and you want to share it with the world and build a sense of community. I was never a fan of In The End, and I didn't even want it to be on the record, honestly.Songs like these are why I wouldn't consider myself a fan of Linkin Park. I learnt that after making Hybrid Theory. Even Chester grew to appreciate the song, commenting to Australian website, Vmusic in 2013, “I don't really participate in picking singles. In July this year, it passed one billion streams on YouTube, the band’s second track to do so following, Numb, and is now quite rightly viewed as a classic. Chester and Mike would just hold out the microphones and turn the lights on.”Įven now, In The End continues to resonate. “Naturally, at some point, we just stopped playing at that moment. “When we’d play In The End live, when we got to the bridge, it was always so loud that you couldn’t hear the band play,” guitarist Brad Delson told Kerrang! in 2020. “We did One Step Closer and Crawling worldwide, then we added Papercut just in Europe, so we could time it out and we could do In The End as one push at the end of the record.” “We moved about singles to converge,” explains Mike. The rest of the band and their label, Warner Music, were more confident. Everyone liked the song but he had reservations about it being a single because it was softer.” He’s on record with all those different things. “You’ll hear him say everything from, ‘I like the song but I never wanted it to be a single’, to ‘I hated the song’. “He was such an entertainer, in an interview he might say something that he felt would get a good reaction out of you,” laughs Mike.
In particular, Chester publicly voiced his misgivings. They knew they had a hit on their hands, but at the same time, the band worried that the track was too much of a departure from their heavier material, leaving it out of their earlier live sets for fear it was too accessible. In a sense that’s still what goes on today, it’s a timeless and universal thing."
And especially as a young person that’s just how I felt, that’s how we all felt, we just didn’t know what to make of things. Because usually a song isn’t about having no answers right? It just kind of runs itself around in a circle lyrically. “What’s so odd about the song is its almost talking about these things and saying ‘I don’t have any answers’. "There’s a weird battle with hopelessness and the ephemeral nature of time and our lives that the song is really about,” Mike told Rock Sound in 2020. “I tried so hard and got so far / But in the end, it doesn’t even matter.” Starting with a sparse and sombre piano riff, Mike’s rapped verses were born from a frustration and self-loathing (“ One thing I don’t know why/ it doesn’t even matter how hard you try”), but it was Chester’s soaring chorus, a sucker punch of cathartic futility, that tapped into the emotional confusion of youth and connected music fans across the board. Their previous singles, One Step Closer, Crawling and Europe-only single Papercut, had proved instant hits with angsty teenagers who were being turned onto heavy music, but In The End, was the gamechanger that would make the band truly omnipresent. “A lot of that stuff was in the ether, but we counterbalanced it with introspection and other stuff about ourselves.”īy the time the band released the single at the tail end of December 2001, Hybrid Theory had already sold five million copies and Linkin Park were one of the biggest bands in the world. “We didn’t want to write about, ‘Punch you in the face and I’m so mad’,” says Mike. The band channelled that pain and buckets of teenage angst into their songwriting. Vocalist Chester Bennington, who had joined the band in 1999 after auditioning via demo tape, was blessed with the kind of voice that could segue from angelic cleans to glass-gargled scream in the blink of an eye, but he also brought with him a childhood of trauma, having experienced abuse and bullying in his youth. In sharp contrast the likes of Limp Bizkit – who lived out every hedonistic heavy metal cliché, including a release party for their third album Chocolate Starfish And The Hotdog Flavoured Water at the Playboy mansion – Linkin Park sang about anger, anxiety and depression. The song was a far cry from the rest of nu metal’s fratboy posturing.
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