Linkin Park bassist Dave “Phoenix” Farrell has said in a new interview that the band had been writing new music before COVID-19 struck. While that has been put “on pause” for now due to quarantining, Farrell said he is still “working up ideas” and being creative at home while keeping in touch with his bandmates.
Appearing on the Dave Really Likes Wine livestream, Farrell explained, “For us, with the band, we’ve been kinda writing and doing that before this all started, so casually at this point we’re doing Zoom meetings to eat lunch together and say, ‘Hi.’ But we’re not able to get together and write or do that whole bit. So working at home a little bit, working up ideas.”
Farrell added that he has also been playing drums for the last year or year and a half, “just to do something new.”
Linkin Park has not released any new music since the death of singer Chester Bennington in 2017. The band has not addressed whether they intend to carry on, either with Mike Shinoda as the sole vocalist or with a replacement for Bennington.
Guitarist Brad Delson told us a while back that the band has always followed its own creative instincts: “We have to do artistically and creatively what we're driven to do, irrespective of, like, the advice everyone's giving us or the commercial ramifications of it, and ultimately I think if you chase what you love and you chase great art, then everything else follows. I think where people get into trouble is when they're chasing what they think people want to hear and it becomes flat and derivative and disingenuous, and that's the last thing we wanted to do.”
Linkin Park's last LP to date, One More Light, came out in May 2017, just months before Bennington took his own life.