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Album is being released globally today! Let us know what your favorite songs are!

Debris doesn't have any gang vocals, Mike is the only one on vocals on that song. He did write the entire demo by himself.

On Mike's stream today, he mentioned that while volume one of "Dropped Frames" is not even out yet, he has already mixed volume two and submitted it. He's now working on putting volume three together, with an estimated release time of about four weeks between albums. Finally, he confirmed that volume two will have a different cover as well. Mike said about volume one, "I'll tell you the tracklisting, but a lot of it won't make sense to you. Just for those of you who haven't already seen it. The tracklisting is Open Door, Super Galaxtica, which is already out on your streaming services, Duckbot is the one that is kind of started with an electronic..., Cupcake Cake which is also known as the Bollywood Jam, El Rey Domonio which was the Mariachi Jam, Doodle Buzz, Channeling that has Dan Mayo.. this is actually Channeling part 1 because I made two things with Dan Mayo, Osiris which is also out right now, Babble Bobble, Session McSessionface, Neon Crickets, and the final track is gonna be Booty Down." He added, "Very happy about putting that out. I have already mixed and delivered volume 2, so that will be out in a month or so. It will have 12 more songs, no vocals this time on volume 2, so in a month from now. And it will have a new cover, which you haven't seen. And you won't see until it gets released, or leaked, or whatever."

Mike's Q&A recap and highlights from July 7th! Mike took a huge look at the "Open Door" multitracks in ProTools and discussed the song... we highly recommend it if you haven't seen it. The vocal layering is pretty impressive. - "If you had an opportunity to travel back in time to change a moment in your life, would you do it or not?" -> "That's a good question. And I know that you weren't thinking of what I'm thinking of right now when you wrote that question, because now it becomes painfully obvious what the answer to that question is. So we're going to take that and move that, and put that to the side. And other than that, hmm. The joke version of that was - red hair, that's what you guys said in the chat. What else was there? Blue hair. Here's a crazy, like, to go ahead and dive into the real answer to that question though... here's the thing. Here's an existential question - if you know somebody who is super depressed and they are... in the process of the last few years, I've talked to many people who have said they have a friend or relative or know somebody who has attempted suicide many times and they were like, "What should I do?" So the question becomes, if you had the Doc Brown time machine and you could go back in time and be there when the person did it and effectively just be there. In your imagination, you'd just be there and you'd stop them. But if they are going to keep trying, then being there doesn't fix it, right? Mmm. So then... what do you do? I don't know what you do, I don't have the answer to that question, Doc Brown." - "The Meeting of the ATS documentary suggests the sessions became somewhat stressful at the end. Could you talk about what was going on at that time? Were there fears of missing deadlines?" -> "The ATS sessions got stressful at the end because they we were trying to get the record wrapped up and we had committed to a deadline and then the deadline was starting to approach and then we realized, it was like, "Oh, we've got a real deadline." And that's really the only reason. We were just trying to keep ourselves on track to do like, do the things we said we were going to do and finish the record. It wasn't stressful the way Hybrid Theory was stressful or the way Minutes To Midnight was stressful. Hybrid Theory was stressful because the guy from the label was being horrible and trying to change everything. The Minutes To Midnight sessions were getting stressful because it felt like we were never going to put a record out, it was just like going around in circles over and over and making more demos and making more demos." - Mike was asked if the tabs you can buy for guitarists are officially done by the band or done by someone else just listening to the music. Mike: "I don't remember. I have personally never done those, I have never sat down and said, "This is what I wrote." At the same time, I know that our stuff is not super complex so you can hear the notes. So you wouldn't need to be some virtuoso to figure out what the guitar part on "What I've Done" is, for example. But I haven't been asked, so that's my answer. But probably, the artist is not asked." - Asked if he has any weird traditions: "Not really. We celebrate Japanese Children's Day, we do Halloween, we do all of the normal ones." - "Why wasn't Debris released? It was a lit demo." -> "I always liked Debris. It is a good demo. I tried to play with it, I got as far as the demo that you've heard that's on the LPU release. I got that far with it, and I submitted it to the band. We had our Monday Meetings, like here are demos, here are demos. I submitted it to the band a few times and I was like, "I like this track" and nobody else liked it. And I just didn't finish it, because nobody was into it. It is what it is. And that's sometimes how it works guys" - Mike said you are allowed to cover the new songs and post them online as long as you are not making money from them. He specifically said he instructed his management to whitelist them to allow them to be played on Twitch in streams. If it's on YouTube or somewhere else, give Mike credit. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/672688792

A new Mike interview with SPIN ahead of the "Dropped Frames, Vol. 1" release on Friday has been released. Here are the highlights: Besides the obvious, how did the collaborative process change for you on this record? "I’ve been letting a current of chance and curiosity guide me for the past few years. Those things were important to me forever, but even more so right now. And that plays into the interconnectedness of creating things on the fly. For example, on my channel, I let fans submit song style suggestions into a bowl, and I’ll pick a few of them to mash up together. Often times, they’ll submit things I don’t know anything about or things I actually don’t like. On the stream, I’ve mashed up Kpop, melodic metal, horrorcore rap, video game music, country, and “a song in the style of the Pokemon Mew.” Keeping an open mind to the styles and finding a way to make them sound cool to my ear is often a challenge, but it’s almost always entertaining. And I learn a lot." Did you find this to be a stopgap measure that could be a way to do things in the future or is it literally a stopgap measure? "I think, if a vaccine was released tomorrow and everything went back to the way it was, I’d still be streaming. I definitely enjoy it and I think there’s a way for it to evolve into future creative projects." Will there be a second volume of Dropped Frames? How do you envision it happening? "I’m already working on Vol. 3, actually! I make so much music on the channel, there’s a lot of material to get out there. I feel like, when I get bored of doing it this way, it’ll force me to adapt." Are you working any new material? "Yep. The first question is always, “Linkin Park?” The answer to that is, no. I’m playing with a bunch of ideas, and when something feels ready for the world, I’ll make it known." What about Fort Minor? "You never know! We’ll see if the wind blows in that direction." Check out the full interview here.

Ahead of the release of "Dropped Frames, Vol. 1", NME has posted a new interview with Mike. How would you describe the overall vibe and feel of music you made together? “It’s spontaneous. A lot of the time with music I feel like I channel what’s happening in the moment. This stuff sonically comes from when it’s being created. We archived all of the Twitch episodes on Youtube so you can go back and see where it came from. I know that when the Black Lives Matter protests were starting, the track we made that day was sombre and soulful. It was sonically appropriate for the kind of day that it was. That track didn’t make it onto this album, but it will be on a future volume." Were you working on the follow-up to ‘Post Traumatic’ before this project took hold? “I was working on really random stuff. I still am, because I’m a little slower in quarantine. There’s a song for myself here, a song for someone else there. I’m still experimenting and trying to figure out what I’m trying to do next. I feel like I’m going down 20 different roads at once. If there’s ever anything to talk about, I’ll talk about it on my stream.” It was recently revealed that Linkin Park had unheard tracks featuring Chester. Have you spent much time in recent years going through the vaults? “No, I haven’t. For every record I’ve done, there are tracks in varying degrees of completion with vocals on them. Releasing them isn’t on the schedule.” You also recently shared unseen gig footage from 2001. Can fans expect from archive gig stuff? “We’re all aware that this year is the 20th anniversary of ‘Hybrid Theory’, so we’re planning to do something for that. I don’t want to give anything away, so I’ll just leave it there.” Chester’s former Grey Daze recently released the album ‘Amends‘ featuring his vocals. Was that a surreal experience, being outside of the project? “I haven’t heard it. They did it on their own. I can’t listen to it. I don’t want to hear his voice. It’s hard enough for me to listen to Linkin Park albums. It has to be on the right day. I did watch some of his son Jaime’s video, though. I got through two minutes of it before it became a little too much for me.” Check out the full interview here.

Mike's Q&A highlights from Monday, June 6th! - "Does it feel any different between playing a stadium where everybody paid to see only you versus a festival where the crowd is mixed?" -> "Size of the venue aside, let's just say those two things are the same size, who knows... bands generally look at festivals as either: festivals generally are a place where you mix between other bands in front of other fans and all that in order to spread awareness of your band. And on the other side of that, if you're on the headline side of things, then festivals pay really well. So like the reason the festivals go for the big headliners is because that's a big draw. If you don't have a big headliner for your festival then.... your festival is only going to be as big as your headliner. Having lots of little acts, it's ok, but the second you get Beyonce.... I personally enjoy the festivals because they are a mix of fans and I know that some people are new my stuff no matter what. And then a headline show is great because you're bringing your vision to the stage. When you see somebody's proper show, their headline show, they have put that together in terms of how they'd like to be presented. Any band that does the exact same thing on both of those shows, I think that's a little weird. We did that at some points, tried to bring the exact same show. But I still feel like the headline shows end up being more authentic to the brand or the band or whatever." - "What are your thoughts on doing a remix contest for one of the jams?" -> "I love remixes and I love remix contests. Maybe if you stay tuned, I might have a remix contest for you to participate in. That might happen. Mike... was that foreshadowing? Were you hinting at something right there?" - "Were your parents supported of your decision of wanting to be in the arts?" -> "My parents were supportive. I've been drawing since I was like three. My parents knew that's what I wanted to do. So it was not much of a surprise to them. The surprise was that when I got to the end of art school which was very expensive, I was like, "hey I want to go be in this band, I want to do this band thing" and they were like, "what?!" They were supportive." - "What do you think of the Grey Daze album?" -> "I haven't heard the Grey Daze album and I kind of don't... I watched... his son Jaime did a video, he was on a song and did a video for them. And I gave them a shoutout on Twitter because Jaime, you know, because you know... Talinda said he wanted to do that record and she supported it so I was like, "well ok if they're supporting it and he really wanted to do it, fine." And then Jaime did a video, and so I tried to watch that video and listen to that song but I didn't really make it through it. It was weird to hear him that way and I guess they were just using vocals that, he had, I don't know, he had went in and cut some vocals and they were just working with those. And I just, I don't know, simultaneously I didn't connect with it and then it made me sad so it was just, "I can't listen to this." So, it is what it is, but good luck to those guys. But by the way, Jaime is a talented guy, he writes and he does film scoring and he's getting more into directing and stuff like that. I hope he gets more film and video jobs. He's really passionate about it." - "What synthesizers did you use on Post Traumatic?" -> "The synthesizers I use. So the VSTs, most of the stuff I show you here, I mean this is the stuff, you know? So if you watch this channel. Massive, the Prophet, Moog, Roland SH-01, Virus, Cwejman, Juno, OP-1, Serum. I use a lot of different stuff, the Nord is one of my go tos and I basically use that mostly as a sampler keyboard. I put my own sounds in it and then I mix and match those with some of the ones that are in there already. But I use lots of keyboards because that's my primary instrument, so I just mess around with whatever sounds good." - "Could you do a more complete tour of the track, show us how you mixed it, how you layered the vocals, the voices, especially with the vocals that were just from the phone?" -> "Oh you mean Open Door! Oh! Ok so I didn't use any vocals that were from the phone. I selected vocalists... from the ones who sang on their phone and stuff, I sent them a DM and I said, "Can you send me a high quality vocal of that, of your performance? And send me what you sang." And most of them, they were singing into a microphone and it was a phone recording or whatever, so I knew they either had a recording of it or had a capability to do a recording of it. I didn't use any phone vocals. And most people when they sent that, most people sent lead vocals and some background vocals, some harmonies and all this shit man. It was so many vocals. I could show you that a different day. Do you want to do that tomorrow? I could do that tomorrow. It was so many vocals you guys, holy crap, oh my god, it was so many. Alright, tomorrow we'll do it, we'll look at the Open Door vocals." - "How many drawings did you get while on tour?" -> "I don't know. And obviously I can't even keep them all, because we get drawings every day. But all of the stuff... if you handed it to us, we saw it. Even if you handed it to the crew, even most of that stuff came to us. I mean generally Jim Digby knew, he would tell people, "yeah the band wants to see this stuff." Unless we can't, unless we don't have time while we are there or whatever." - "You must have a ton of musical ideas on your hard drive. How do you manage the files, ideas and samples to find them later on?" -> "My samples are on my hard drive, my projects are on an external drive, my samples I organize by... I have a specific folder for stuff that I've collected and made. Like I just try and keep it organized as I go. The same with the sessions. You've just gotta try, you know, you do your best. Don't just save files wherever." - "Did you ever think of releasing vocals and acapellas for demos like "I Have Not Begun"? -> "Acapellas or whatever, I feel like... instrumentals are one thing, acapellas are like, I think that's good if that's like a single. For like random b-sides and stuff like that, I don't feel like the demand is that high." https://www.twitch.tv/videos/671736552

Mike: "I haven't listened to it. It's weird to hear Chester that way, I think they used some vocals he had cut. I tried to watch Soul Song. I didn't connect with it, and it also made me sad so I can't listen to it"

Kerrang is taking questions from fans for an upcoming interview with Mike via Zoom. "His new album, Dropped Frames, Vol. 1, is out on July 10. And on Monday, July 13 at 4:30pm (BST) @mikeshinoda will be joining us for an exclusive Zoom interview! Join the call by emailing your question for Mike and your name to feedback@kerrang.com. Best questions win a slot" Good luck!

A new interview with Mike, done from his home studio via video call, has been posted by Rock Sound. Mike described how "Dropped Frames" came about, "Open Door", and more. - "Open Door": "After I had shut that down for the day, I realized that I really want some vocals on that song. And I thought "I just spent the last little while l with the fans, why don't I just see if there is a fan who could sing the song?" So I did a little contest for the song "Open Door", had all the lyrics and everything done so all they had to do was sing it. So I posted it, I literally texted it to fans. I texted the high res file to like 10,000 people... so somebody's got it, just track down somebody who's got the song, and you can sing over it. Put it online, use the hashtag, and I'll find it." The failed P!ATD jam: "I remember they wanted me to do a song in the style of Panic! At The Disco. And I just couldn't do it. I tried, and it just didn't sound good. So I just gave up and we did something silly. So I was going for modern and I told them before I even started, "Their music right now is all Brendon Urie's voice. So the second you don't have his voice, like what genre are you really even in? I don't even know what to call it. The new record is kind of like, pop/rock music." This was the day that "Booty Down" was created at the end of the stream. Picking "Open Door" vocalists: "There were hundreds of submissions. I feel like I could tell very quickly who was a professional vocalist and who wasn't. The hobbyists... there were a lot of people who can sing, and they sing well, and then there were people who were like, they do it for a living. So it was very quickly I could tell from the quality of the singing who I would consider putting on the song. And it was a short list. Originally I was thinking I'd pick just one person, but I liked so many of them that I ended up putting seven of these people on the song because they were all so different. There's a couple of girls from Russia, one of which is a little more R&B, one is a little more rock. One is a guy who goes by Phantom who has like face tattoos and his music is very modern but trap and rock and electronic and whatever. There's a guy Pershard, in the video his hair is all crazy, he's the only one who submitted anything that sounded like that. And he's great, he's so so talented, so good. There were seven different people, all different styles and different ways of approaching the track. Like they sent in lead vocals, they sent in harmonies, I probably did have somewhere between fifty and seventy five vocal tracks to sort through in order to really listen to and find what I wanted to put on the song. Mixing it was a bitch but it ended up being cool." - "Open Door" being on "Dropped Frames, Vol. 1": "I decided to put that on the front end of all of it because it kind of happened in the same moment. But the rest of the stuff I'm releasing for right now is going to be instrumental." - Releasing an instrumental album: "I've never released an instrumental album. There's a poetry to instrumental music that I've always enjoyed listening to. I grew up drawing and painting and a lot of times I'd paint and draw to instrumental music. It lets your mind kind of wander and go wherever it takes you. A song like that could mean one thing to one person and another thing to another. It leaves it open for like, thought and creativity. It's perfect music for studying and drawing and waking up/laying down, putting on in the background, etc... it's almost useful music in a sense. Like use it for whatever your thing is. In the beginning, fans asked a bunch of times, "Are you going to put vocals on it? Let's put vocals on it." And the truth is, number one, vocals are... it's a tedious process especially for me. I don't do vocals quickly and I wouldn't watch anybody to watch me sitting on a stream with a beat looping for six hours while I type on a computer, delete, type, delete, and then mumble to myself and leave the room. That's not fun for anybody. The other thing is, I feel as an artist, there's something in the stress of the world... with the news, and the pandemic, all of the things that are going on, so stressful, I feel like there's a poetry to the instrumental track that is appropriate for this moment in time. We are being talked at so much, like our whole experience on our phones is just people shouting. And you turn on the news and people are shouting. Everywhere I go, people are shouting. So I feel like this is a way to take a break, in a sense." - "Open Door" lyrics applying to current times even though it was written before the pandemic: "That was a surprising thing for me as well. At first I was like, "I don't know if I should attach Open Door to these other songs because they're not the same thing." But the reason I think we decided to do it is because it's a good launching point in terms of the context of everything and the fact that yeah, it was written originally about looking for opportunity, looking for something good in the midst of whatever else, all the noise that's going on. And it's also like, there are moments where I'm talking to myself but moments where I'm not... I'm like, thematically I'm going back and forth with like a pep talk for myself and encouraging, almost like challenge, to somebody who might be listening." - "Hybrid Theory" anniversary, why "In the End" is still so popular: "I think that when we wrote it, I remember being in... we were rehearsing in this little room in Hollywood. And when I say Hollywood, it was the grossest part of Hollywood. At the time, Hollywood & Vine had like prostitutes and drug dealers. There was a taco shop on the corner, an all black hair salon next door, like a grocery story with a Korean couple who ran that on the corner, and a bunch of like Scientologists. There was a place that was a reading center that was teaching you how to read but all of the books were Scientology books which is really kind of dark. And that was the place where we found a rehearsal room that we could afford. And we were working on our show and our songs there. And I decided to stay overnight in that building and I wrote "In the End." And I think Rob Bourdon was the first one to show up the next day for rehearsal and I played it for him and he was freaking out. There was something about that, there's a weird battle with hopelessness that, in our nature and our times, that the song is really about. What's odd about the song is it's almost talking about these things and saying like, "I don't have any answers." Because usually a song isn't about having no answers, right? It just kind of runs itself around in a circle lyrically. Especially as a young person, that's how I felt, that's how we all felt. I didn't know what to make of things and I think in a sense, that's still what goes on today. Time is a very universal thing. The fact is, yeah, it's been one of our biggest songs, it's been our biggest song for a long time." - "Hybrid Theory" at Download Festival 2014: "We played it in order. In the early days, we played every song off the album, but we just didn't play it in order. Download would have been the only one where we played it in order. I felt like it was a matter of time before we did that, before we played that album front-to-back just because people were starting to do it. People were starting to play their biggest albums front-to-back and we were slowly pulling some of those songs out of the set, so they were more in demand. Not that we were doing it so there WOULD be demand, it was because we were trying to make room for our other songs and then obviously it's like, "Aw! They actually didn't play Crawling tonight!" We always played In the End, sometimes we wouldn't play other songs off of that record. So it was like, "Oh ok, there's already this feeling of fans who want to come see that at that show.""

7/17 and 8/21, two parts coming.

As we close out the first Friday in July, Mike had a Q&A on his stream so here are the highlights. - Mike says it is too difficult logistically to do bigger sizes in his merch store as he'd have to get another retailer to supply bigger sizes. - "Hey Mike, I was wondering if you guys ever talked about the possibility of continuing LP, could this be with a female vocalist?" -> "In terms of Linkin Park and singers, that is a deep a question as you can have or get and I do not think that today is the day to discuss it. But I appreciate the obvious interest in the subject." - "Do you remember anything from the Linkin Park concert at Milton Keynes in 2008? I had to convince my boyfriend to go to the concert instead of a football match." -> "Hey I know how it is with you guys and your football. And the footie.. it's hard to get anybody that's a football to get something other than football when their team is on. So, it's not surprising. Milton Keynes is... what a venue. That's obviously, like legendary. For those who don't know about Milton Keynes, it's like Rock In Rio but with more history, it's like Coachella but with actual culture. When did Milton Keynes start? The 70s, the 60s? Right? In the 800s? They've been doing shows at Milton Keynes since people rode there on horseback and checked their cloaks and their armor at the door. "Pardon me, sir. Can't enter with that... I'm sorry sir, breastplates are not allowed inside. Is there some place where I could check my falcon?"" Ha! - "I've been wondering what happened to the song Looking For An Answer that you played at the tribute concert at the Hollywood Bowl. Have you developed it and will you release it?" -> "I tried to develop it a little bit and I never felt like it did the song justice. The best version to me, even though my voice was too shaky and the performance was.... what it was... the Hollywood Bowl performance to me was more special than any other version so we didn't release it. Plus I played the version for the guys and the guys were like, so uncomfortable. It was not a good vibe. So, yeah, it was just a... it gives us bad vibes." - "You once said you weren't going to show the One Step Closer music video to your kids. If they've seen it by now what was their opinion on it and the red hair?" -> "They have not, I don't think they've seen it. I know what their reaction would be. They would laugh hysterically and make fun of me and that would be that. They'd also follow that up with a week long pressure campaign to let them dye their hair bright red, which we're not into because, like, I guess it's bad for their scalp. I didn't know this until I had kids, apparently if you started bleaching your hair too young you can change the actual consistency of your hair. For example you can make straight hair a little curly or vice versa, you can change your color of your actual hair. Or it can fall out. So nobody wants to mess with that. It's just bad, the chemicals and stuff are bad for kids. Most people who do hair will say, "Yeah yeah, don't mess with kids hair. Until they're done developing. Pre-puberty especially, that's bad."" - "My daughters love the song Ghosts and Boris of course. Why did you name him Boris? It's a very common name in Russia." -> "Boris just seemed like his name, I don't know. It just like seemed like the name. It was one of those intuitive things and you kind of just go with it. He popped out of the universe and he said, "My name is Boris." Boris - and that was that.... I had no choice." - "Which LP or Fort Minor song do you wish was more popular?" -> "Wow, that's a good question, I don't know. More popular? Which LP or Fort Minor song do YOU GUYS wish was more popular? In Stereo, that's a good vote. Cigarettes. Kenji, yeah. Hands Held High. High Road. Red to Black. Cool, those are all good. I think I'd agree with a lot of those. Did somebody say this? Empty Spaces. The answer is Empty Spaces. I wish Empty Spaces was a lot more popular. No, probably.. Kenji is an important song to the record. I feel like Kenji is appropriately semi-popular. It's popular with the right people." - "I was wondering if we could get an MS skull art on canvas or any form of picture." -> "Interesting. On canvas? I think it'd have to be the right reason. I think I'd actually have to have a painting that I'd want to turn into a canvas print. But, maybe! Maybe." https://www.twitch.tv/videos/668962257

Mike only answered a few questions on July 2nd, but we covered it regardless: - "Hey Mike, do you think about doing a mini concert from your home?" -> "I don't really want to do a concert from home, from the studio or whatever. I don't know, I feel like the concerts from home... I don't know, a lot of people do them. It's very easy to do." - "Are there outfits you regret wearing from back then? What's the most ridiculous piece of clothing?" -> "Clothing from back then? I mean the pants were pretty extreme. But I certainly wasn't the only one wearing them, everyone was wearing them. It is what it is. You know what I never did, really, I mean a couple of occasions. I mean it was not really my thing, was wallet chains. I stayed away from wallet chains, I wasn't a fan. They were too rock for me." https://www.twitch.tv/videos/667979874

This was around the time of the Hybrid Theory EP, which Kyle is credited for, and before Scott joined the touring lineup, so it seems likely that yes this is Kyle.

When we were listening to the lyrics to send to LPHQ to update the Open Door video on YouTube.... we noticed there are so many layers of vocals buried on the track. Check the bridge which seems like just an instrumental but there are a lot of layered vocals there. Pretty good job by Mike.