The Long Way to the Barricade

Linkin Park played in India for the first time in January 2026, in Bangalore, and I was the first person through the gate. The wristband says so: EE1. The early entry crowd had its own queue, and Adam and Lorenzo from the LP team walked us to the entrance, past thousands of people waiting patiently in the normal line. Walking past them was a little ridiculous and a lot of fun. We headed for the barricade. The field was still empty, the stalls were only just set up, and the big screens were cycling through photos of LPU members, including ours. As I stood there waiting for the show to begin, all I could think about was 2004.

Back then I was doing college in a small Kerala town, if you could even call it a town. It was mostly a village, and I had hair down to my shoulders. Hybrid Theory and Meteora landed on us like one enormous banger. It still amazes me that a young band, only two albums in, had already reached a bunch of boys and girls in a place like that, which tells you how far and how fast their appeal had travelled. To begin with, In the End, Points of Authority and Faint were pure headbanging material, and with that hair, they were perfect. The angst got to me next, and once I actually listened to the lyrics, I found there was usually more to think about than to headbang to. The same song could be a screamer one day and something I sat with quietly the next.

I never came to Linkin Park with a fixed idea of what they should sound like. In When They Come for Me, Mike raps "And I'm not a robot, I'm not a monkey
I will not dance even if the beat's funky", and that has always described me. I don't jump into fads, but when I like something, I'm all in, so for me Linkin Park never stopped at Hybrid Theory and Meteora. I stayed through Minutes to Midnight, A Thousand Suns, Living Things, The Hunting Party and One More Light, and each had its own greatness.

A Thousand Suns took years to open up to me: the speeches woven through it, Chester rapping on Blackout, Mario Savio on Wretches and Kings, Iridescent, The Catalyst, Robot Boy, and the Oppenheimer thread running underneath it all. I had to grow up before it made sense. The Hunting Party was the album I connected with least, and it's the one that keeps pulling me back now with Guilty All the Same, Until It's Gone and Rebellion. The politics in their music went over my head at the time, and Hands Held High, from Minutes to Midnight, sounds more current today than the day it came out.

As I was writing this, YouTube autoplay put on Waiting for the End, the version with Emily, and it hit me right in the core, the way it always does now.

Some songs are always in rotation: Given Up and that scream, Leave Out All the Rest, Bleed It Out (still my go-to), Little Things Give You Away, Shadow of the Day, Lost in the Echo, Burn It Down and Castle of Glass. Roads Untraveled hits different. It can never be a surprise play, so I only put it on myself, when I'm ready for it.

I remember the day Heavy dropped as the first single from One More Light. It hit different, and so did the whole album when it arrived. Friends called it pop, some called it crap, and the critics trashed it badly enough that Chester lashed out at them. You could see how much the album meant to the band, and how little the world got it.

That July, I woke up to a message from my cousin in the US: "Dude, Chester passed away." That was all it said, and the morning was shattered. For hours there were only rumours online and nothing confirmed. When I saw the Talking to Myself video had just come out, I started bargaining: they wouldn't release a video if something had really happened. Mike's confirmation ended that, and what was left was a void.

One More Light changed meaning overnight. Talking to Myself is still the hardest to listen to, and Good Goodbye, Battle Symphony and Halfway Right all became something else. The critics who trashed it had no idea what that album was about to mean to people.

It wasn't only that album, either. Every song shifted after Chester and became more personal, like songs a friend had made, and Breaking the Habit became pure emotion. At the tribute concert the band gave it their hearts, but the image that stays with me is a single microphone under a spotlight while the audience sang. I teared up, and grown men cried that night.

The band needed time, since their life's work had been upended in a day. Mike, though, cannot not make music. He worked through it in Post Traumatic and let all of us come along, and I felt those songs more than I heard them. Each one healed a little more.

When they came back in September 2024, Mike opened The Emptiness Machine livestream with "It's good to see you again." Fuck. Two years on, I still get goosebumps. Later, introducing the new lineup one by one, he ended with "My name is Mike, this is Emily, and in the role of Chester Bennington this afternoon is each of you." In one line he made it clear that nobody was replacing Chester, and that his place belonged to all of us. As far as I know, Mike said it that once and never again across the hundred-odd shows that followed. He didn't need to, because we only needed to hear it once.

Emily sang her heart out. Her link to Scientology made me uneasy at first, and I'll admit I've chosen to read her silence on it generously, but as an LP fan I trust Mike to have weighed it. What made her Linkin Park for me was Waiting for the End, which for a long time, from what I saw, she couldn't get all the way through. She was a fan too, and that sealed it. Linkin Park was back, life got colourful again, and I loved every new song as it came out, each one Linkin Park coded.

I'd always wanted to see them live. As a broke college kid it never seemed possible, and by the time I had the money, the band was gone. When they came back, Preethi told me we were going to Jakarta to see them for my birthday.

We've known each other since 2004, the same year I found Linkin Park. We started dating in 2006 and married in 2012, but we each became Linkin Park fans on our own. Neither of us ever had to sell the band to the other, and it went the same way with F1 and Lewis Hamilton. At any point in the day, one of our work rooms is probably playing Linkin Park.

In February 2025 we were in the crowd in Jakarta together. They opened with Somewhere I Belong, and after more than 20 decades, I couldn't have asked for a better start. Everyone sang everything, so it felt like a Linkin Park singalong with the band on stage. Waiting for the End broke me, and so did When They Come for Me. When they closed with Bleed It Out with Cut the Bridge, I sang, grieved and celebrated with that crowd.

We hadn't planned on Lollapalooza, even with Linkin Park in the roster. But when they added Bangalore, we were stoked. Early Entry was first come, first served for LPU members, and everyone had to grab their own number, so Preethi and I sat in the same room, each on our own membership, and it came down to fastest fingers first. I got EE1, she got EE13, and a friend doing it alongside us got 73.

The night before the show, the LPU hosted From Zero Night, a meetup for about 100 members, where we finally met friends we'd only known from WhatsApp and Discord groups.

The next day, that same crowd went to the barricade together as a gang, with banners and posters. Bloodywood opened, and oh boy, they're a whole other post. Linkin Park played Bleed It Out with A Place for My Head that night to close, the version I've always preferred, and we even turned up in Joe Hahn's photo dump. Anna Shinoda was there too, and I met Colin and got a poster and a cap signed. We could see how far Emily had come, too. In Jakarta she'd left the stage the moment the last song ended. Eleven months later in Bangalore, she carried herself like someone who knew she belonged in Linkin Park.

And during the show, still singing, Mike stopped in front of Preethi and signed her cap.

There isn't a Linkin Park song left that doesn't mean something to me. In the End is still college, One More Light is that July morning, and Post Traumatic is Mike showing all of us how to carry grief. From Zero is a barricade in Bangalore with Preethi beside me. And Roads Untraveled is the one I still save for the days I can face it.