Mike Shinoda and Emily Armstrong sat down with Genius to break down the lyrics of ‘The Emptiness Machine’ from their recent album ‘From Zero.’
During the interview, Shinoda revealed the almost religious context of the song and explained how he came up with it.
“On the second verse lyrics, sometimes I’ll write a line even in like a singing song where I’m like, ‘That’s a bar. I like that one,'” the rocker explained. “‘There’s a fire under the altar, I keep on lying to in my mind.’ The way that’s read is, ‘I’m praying at the altar and I’m lying like I’m a liar to God,’ or whatever. That’s such a nasty little idea we rarely ever do anything that’s religious related, but in the context of this song, it’s not like religion religion, it’s more like a metaphorical thing that everybody is a part of this machine that is toxic.”
‘The Emptiness Machine’ came out as the first single of ‘From Zero.’ Over two months after the track’s release, the band released the album.
Recently, the entire album except for the introductory title track occupied all ten spots in Billboard’s Hot Hard Rock Songs chart. ‘The Emptiness Machine’ took the lead and the rest of the album followed in order — ‘Heavy Is the Crown,’ ‘Two Faced,’ ‘Over Each Other,’ ‘Cut the Bridge,’ ‘Stained,’ ‘Good Things Go,’ ‘Overflow,’ ‘Casualty,’ and ‘IGYEIH.’
In other news, Emily Armstrong revealed in another interview that she was interested in participating in the Chester Bennington tribute show but hesitated at first. “I was like, ‘Who the f*ck? Why would they want me?’ But I asked, but it was a little too late. Somebody got word of it at some point, but it was just like, yeah, we already have it all,” she admitted.
Linkin Park is currently on tour to support ‘From Zero.’
