June 18, 2017 - Clisson, France | Hellfest 2017

Oh, you mean like they've literally been saying since 2007?

 

That and also I think the extremely long wait for One More Light had some to do with it as well. The band originally said the album would be out in mid 2016 so many were expecting a June 2016 release, like how The Hunting Party came out in June 2014 and Living Things came out in June 2012. The fact that it didn't end up coming out until late May 2017 was pretty crazy. And I think a lot of people were underwhelmed because the album is the shortest in the band's career and Heavy is drastically different than The Hunting Party in every way possible. If you think about it, if the band ended up making the pop album that they wanted to in 2013, the lead single would have likely came out in March or April of 2014 and then the album a few months after. That's not long after the Steve Aoki stuff, Recharged, etc. And really not that terribly long from Living Things since it was still a bit fresh in people's mind's since then. The way that Mike and the band promoted The Hunting Party was wrong, they truly did make it seem like they would never make pop songs again, at least in the forseeable future. But they ended up following it up with the poppiest song they've ever done, completely with a Disney radio artist as a feature. The Hunting Party really screwed with a lot of people's minds. And The Hunting Party also has nothing in common with Minutes, Suns or Living Things. It wasn't part of their progression, it was literally a one-off album that came out of whim. If you want my honest opinion, and this may seem crazy, but I think Mike honestly wrote like 90% of The Hunting Party by himself. He already said that the rest of the band besides Chester wasn't interested really in the process and he probably wrote a good majority of the parts and the band just performed them. Chester was absent for a very large part of The Hunting Party's process because he was writing and touring with other bands at that time. Chester also never really contributed much to the albums except for Minutes To Midnight since every band member wrote songs for that album. But usually it was just Brad and Mike making all the songs. I think The Hunting Party was really a huge passion project of Mike's and he went with it. But I think he got over it pretty quickly and by 2015 he wanted to continue on the path Linkin Park was intended to go on.

 

Exactly. One can make the case that it started off (as Xero) as a way for Mike to make hip hop music with rock and electronic influences.

 

It seems like I am one of the few people who likes One More Light more because of the fact that we had THP before it.
If One More Light had come right after Living Things, I would honestly had been a lot more dismissive about its sound, but hearing "Heavy" right after THP felt really refreshing for me.
The two albums work together because of their contrary nature.
I certainly wouldn't want THP to not exist, neither would I necessarily want the next album to sound more in the vain of OML and LT.
I hope LP continues to change things up.

 

I had a reply written out to this, but I deleted it. I feel like everything that can be said about this album has been said before and people are just talking in circles at this point.

 

I think because MTM has an organic sound, OML on the other hand has a modern electronic sound with 808s driven percussion that many people hate and associate with The Chainsmokers and many hated mainstream acts.
Personally I prefer Electronic production over the organic one tbh, that's why maybe I like OML more than MTM.

 

Yep, The Chainsmokers are the new Beatles

 

The songs are just not that good. MTM has plenty of good ones, and that's why people like it, no matter if it sounds like other bands.

 

Let me rephrase that: people don't like it because they think songs are not good.

 

that is also true.