LINKIN PARK 'Experimenting' With Sounds For New Album

According to The Pulse Of Radio, LINKIN PARK vocalist Mike Shinoda told RollingStone.com in a new interview that he expects the band's seventh studio album to surface in the second half of 2016. Shinoda explained: "I've been on a tear in the studio right now with the band. We've been making so much new material… A lot of this stuff is, we're just kind of experimenting a lot with all the different directions the band can go."

The band's last album, 2014's "The Hunting Party", was a return to a heavier style for LINKIN PARK, but Shinoda would not say which direction they're headed in this time. He remarked: "We're just… really heavily focusing on the melodies. Some of the music is coming together here and there but it's really, right now, more about the words and melodies. So I don't actually know what the sound of the record is going to be like yet."

Guitarist Brad Delson told The Pulse Of Radio not long ago that LINKIN PARK has always followed its own creative impulses. "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," he said. "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 has been mostly off the radar for the past year, ever since an early 2015 tour in support of "The Hunting Party" had to be scrapped when frontman Chester Bennington injured his foot.

Bennington also brought his two-year stint as vocalist for STONE TEMPLE PILOTS to an end in late 2015 so he focus more of his energies on LINKIN PARK.