Linkin Park at Wembley Stadium, London 2025

Wembley is not for the faint of heart on a 33°C day and neither is holding a barricade in said heat, but how long have we waited for this moment? This historic moment that is long long overdue to a band of the magnitude and influence of Linkin Park? The heat ain’t got nothing on me.

JPEGMAFIA

Dressed in black from head to toe, with a fur coat that made your eyeballs sweat, Brooklyn-born rapper JPEGMAFIA opened up Wembley with a flurry of karate-chop wordplay, incredibly eloquent and clear despite the stadium echo. Going through hit singles like SIN MIEDO and 1539 N. Calvert with vernacular ease, the electronic samples and live band (way heavier than I would have expected them to be) blended into an up-beat moshing mix, setting springs under our feet and making the crowd jump.

When not rapping or chomping on water bottles like a metal-jawed Looney Tunes, he showed a great sense of humour, like in introducing the song BALD!, he invited his fellow bald comrades to cheer, while for the rest of us hairy people “that’s fucked up, but make some noise!” He chose to end on the softer ballad-like either on or off the drugs, a change from the badass rap persona he’d presented up to that point and a palate cleanser displaying the full breadth of his RnB song production.

Spiritbox

Tempered by a hellishly hot weekend mainstaging Hellfest, Spiritbox looked preternaturally fresh and ready for everything, for some reason making me think of Gojira during their Olympics performance, with the fire balls being replaced by London summer. Definitely bringing the heavy in heavy metal to the mixed-genre crowd, all of us in front row committed to headbanging to the chuggy sludgey waves of riffs. It was hard not to. Fronted by Courtney LaPlante, with her effortless almost intimidating confidence exuding over the whole stadium, the Canadian quartet kicked off with Fata Morgana and didn’t let the energy slip for one second.

“I had to bring my sunglasses out, your smiles are so bright!” If she felt any nervousness, there was no trace of it in her seamless transitions from screams to belting, her clean vocals low and full of longing. With surrealist visuals playing on screen and introspective paradoxical lyrics like “all that ever was will ever be”, their set was a journey into a cold ice world of technological mayhem and colliding mountains, while staying smolderingly tight.

Linkin Park

A clock starts counting down to showtime. Susan Boyle’s I Dreamed a Dream comes out loud on the speakers. The crowd counts to zero with one voice. And then it hits you, like the lasers and the bass kicks. You’re on Wembley. You look up at a bright blue sky, with tens of thousands of strangers who really aren’t that different from you, all together singing words you’ve known for half your life, singing “I wanna heal, I wanna feel like I’m close to something real / I wanna find something I’ve wanted all along / Somewhere I belong”.

Last September, in a surprise performance for a small crowd in LA, Linkin Park returned to us, with Emily Armstrong as co-vocalist, and an imminent 6-date tour was announced that very night. I walked to the O2 in October in disbelief. I listened to them play like they’d never ever stopped, a perfect machine of stage production and crowd connection. My first review for Metal Junkbox was of that night.

So to now be clutching a barricade at Wembley, the band mere feet away and ample space to headbang, was not something I could have ever predicted or hoped for or thought to dream of. I could feel my 15-year-old self holding my hand, can you believe it? We’re here. We made it here.

Yeah. I gotta believe it.

The sound is everywhere, and the crowd needs no prompting: they had waited a long, long time for this chance to bring their sorrows and their lives to this band, and in one earth-shattering cheer, let it all go.

Here’s a list of little moments to paint a picture for you. The mosh pit opens at the heart of Wembley, right behind a guy with a gigantic black flag with “PIT” painted on it. Emily flinches and smiles as the confetti guns go off around her to The Catalyst. Mr Hahn (turntables) and Colin (drums) get their solo moment together. Alex fiddles with his guitar, a string sounds wrong, the band checks in, does it work?, only for the opening riff for A Place for my Head to drive the crowd insane. Mike walks to a front row fan “so you’ve been selected to watch the show from the parking lot. Oh sorry, I meant to say you have two options. Either watch the show from the parking lot or get this hat signed by everyone in the band”.  Phoenix goes as if to smooch the camera in an amazing shot.

They were having a blast. I hold my stance that nobody sounds cooler saying “motherfucker” than Mike Shinoda on When They Come for Me, before we were treated to the forever-sing-a-long-able Remember the Name. In maybe the most confusing clash of emotions I’ve ever experienced, the rap intro to Numb was remixed into a reggaeton beat, as part of an interactive game the band played with the crowd. You want to cry, because it’s Numb, it’s the song, the song that has given words to generations, but it’s also reggaeton and dancey-groovy and Colin is owning it so casually and everyone is having fun, you gotta dance, right? Are you allowed to? Can you laugh and cry at the same time?

Linkin Park is the band I’ve loved the longest. Where each song fits in the tapestry of my life has morphed and changed (my own political awakening as an adult making me hear The Catalyst in a whole new light), but the intensity remains the same. Who of us can hold back screaming to Crawling or One Step Closer or all the anthems that they’ve been so adept at keeping ambiguous, flowing, fit for anger and sadness and disappointment of all shapes and scopes? Is it a love song or a plea? Something anarchic or personal? Is the you, the Two Faced one, a cheating partner, a corrupt politician, a hypocrite, a stranger?

That’s the power they’ve always held most clearly: never naming the enemy, but giving us the strength to fight against it.

You can feel them reinventing their sound, refreshing it, bringing it to who we are and the world we’re inhabiting now. Off the new album, I loved hearing Overflow – specifically because it makes use of Emily’s softer vocals, letting her create her own space in the musical landscape of the band’s oeuvre. Of course, The Emptiness Machine was loudly sung to, but Papercut came from the darkest recesses of everyone’s subconscious, the words as clear as if Hybrid Theory had come out yesterday. There was nowhere to catch an emotional break, when a ballad like Lost was followed by a gut-punch like What I’ve Done, the crowd relentless, with hands in the air, lighting up the stadium to Waiting for the End, bringing it down with a bang to Faint.

But for all our words, some things remain unspoken. This is a new era of Linkin Park; bringing Chester’s name into it at this point would be a cheap way to tug at people’s emotions. Yet his presence was undeniable to anyone with a heart to feel it. Emily had chosen to add Where’d You Go to the setlist as a duet with Mike in the first half of the show and it was impossible not to think of where he’d gone. I saw a woman with a gorgeous portrait of Chester tattooed on her arm. He was on people’s phones as backgrounds or prints. Not one person there, in the band or in the crowd, had forgotten.

It would hit me across the night, out of nowhere: they’re playing Wembley, their first time, they sold it out, they have 90 thousand people singing In the End with them, with that wonderful stadium echo really driving it home: dear God, they are loved. And they do not take it for granted.

The show was over and Mike, after 2 hours of performing at the top of his game, stayed down in the pit, running around the whole barricade, shaking hands and high-fiving fans, fans with flags and gifts and Linkin Park tattoos, of all ages and all backgrounds, who’ve queued for hours in the sun, who’ve loved them for 10 months or 25 fucking years.

They’re still here. We made it here.

Cover photo © Linkin Park

Artist: Linkin Park

Reviewer: Ruxandra Mindru

Venue: Wembley Stadium

City: London

Country: UK