Three members of Linkin Park are mulling a possible 2025 reunion tour and are considering hiring a female vocalist to succeed late lead singer Chester Bennington, several sources close to the band tell Billboard.
Booking agency WME is taking offers for a potential Linkin Park tour along with headlining festival dates featuring Mike Shinoda, Brad Delson and Dave Farrell, the sources say. The band has not indicated who will sing on behalf of Bennington, who was often praised as one of the most gifted and durable vocalists of the 2000s with a dynamic range tailor-made for the group’s genre-bending style.
One source tells Billboard the band is hoping to find a female vocalist to front the reunited band, matching rumors that have been making the rounds in recent weeks. On March 30, during an appearance on Wired in the Empire on KCAL 96.7, Orgy’s Jay Gordon said he had heard rumors about a Linkin Park reunion.
“Very, very cool guys and obviously a great band,” he said. “They’ve been around a long time and they’re still going for it,” he said. “It’s going to be tough without Chester, but we’ll see. I hear they got a girl singer now. That’s what I heard.”
Gordon later issued a statement saying his comments had been taken out of context, writing, “With regards to this linkin park singer thing. I know nothing about any of that.”
Earlier this month, Evanescence frontwoman Amy Lee shot down rumors that she might be a candidate for the lead vocal gig. On April 23, the singer told iHeartRadio Canada that, while some Linkin Park fans had been voicing hopes for her to join the band, the group had not contacted her for the gig.
“But that’s awesome,” she said. “They should ask me about that. I don’t have a ton of free time, but I might do it part-time.”
Shinoda was asked about a possible reunion around the April 14 release of Papercuts (Singles Collection: 2000-2023), telling Revolver magazine, “Rumors always go around. People always ask what’s next for the band, and the best answer I can ever give anybody is when there’s something to tell you, we will tell you. When there’s an announcement to be made, it will be on LinkinPark.com. If you’re hearing it from somebody else, you can trust that information as much as you want to trust it.”
Linkin Park is one of the most successful rock groups from the 2000s, having sold more than 29.4 million albums in the United States, according to Luminate. The band has charted 24 songs on the Billboard Hot 100, including three top 10 hits: “In the End” in 2003, “What I’ve Done” in 2007 and “New Divide” in 2009.
The band has also racked up 37.2 million U.S. song downloads and a combined 11.6 billion official on-demand U.S. streams. It has additionally charted six No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200, including One More Light, which debuted on May 17, 2017, two months before Bennington took his own life at his home in Southern California.
Billboard reached out to a representative for Linkin Park but did not receive a response.
