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As dumb a fixation as this is, I like that we get official artwork for the Lost Demos portion of the box with this release. I know there was custom art posted on here before, but I just prefer official art instead when it's available, even if it's just a palette swap and some added text.

I think I'm probably going to hold onto the LPU redemption until the end of the year unless something big comes up in the meantime. Pretty cool bonus to have, though.

That was the feeling I got from it, too. I'd say it's fine. I think it's a good sign that we've got a remix so soon - maybe there'll be more on the horizon.

Finally got my box set today and I've come around on the new format - it definitely has a more deliberate presentation than the "throw all the shit in" style of HT20, more artful in that way. I do miss having individual sleeves for the CDs with unique cover art, though. At least most of the box gets cover artwork through either this or the vinyl box.

I don't know, man. The vocals on Massive sound to me exactly like what Mike said they were - reference vocals for Chester. Like, he sounds fine - good, even - but it feels like people are getting carried away by pointing to this 20-year-old reference vocal take and using it as proof that Mike can carry the band. It reads to me like hype over a new song going way overboard. To expand a little more, maybe it's the mix or the (likely?) lack of mastering, but Mike's vocals on the chorus in particular have no power at all. It sounds to me like the same voice he uses on the Breaking the Habit demo, and while it's admittedly a lot more obvious there that the vocals are just placeholders, it still feels pretty evident here. I think Mike's singing voice can go over heavy music, but Massive certainly isn't proof of that in my view.

Very much looking forward to hearing Resolution for myself. What a bizarre lineage to trace. Based on the excerpt from the book in M20, it sounds like the band considers Resolution to be a direct predecessor to Lost, rather than the Blue -> Crawling situation where they mined an old song they hated for a piece they liked and inserted that into another demo. This feels like a "Be Yourself is Pictureboard" level reveal, and for it to be about The Wizard Song of all things... This is going to sound like a "I knew all along" moment, but I remember listening to Lost for the first time and feeling like it did sound weirdly similar to the instrumental underneath TWS, but I chalked that up to making connections that weren't actually there and didn't think it through any further. Since it's the chorus of Lost that comes from Resolution, it still probably is placebo effect, but it's funny to think about nonetheless.

I doubt we'll ever get another demos CD now that the box sets are happening. There's a finite amount, after all. I think, barring a change in the band's status, the best you could hope for is a live compilation, or remixes or something.

Me three hours ago: I can wait I don't need to seek em out Me when I see the subreddit is just blasting them all out as they get played: Nvm Mike sounds kind of like Mark Hoppus on the chorus for Massive. Feels very different from his usual singing voice. I don't know if it was talked about by Mike at all, but it definitely sounds pretty early in the process too.

Programming like this is usually replayable on the app for a while after it airs, right? Might be the easiest way to preserve all of it - we're bound to get at least a little bit of new info from this part of the promo cycle. I'm not going to bother listening to any rips of the new demos at this point, though, I can afford to wait three days for the official release.

All the cool shit in this review and we're here talking about The Wizard Song AGAIN, lmao. This makes me very excited to hear the whole demos disc. Very surprising to hear that only Wesside is fully instrumental, of the demos of non-album tracks. I'm a little surprised that we're getting some vocal-less demos of Meteora songs, but it sounds like the balance is way in favor of vocal tracks, so that's great overall. And the notes about A6 - really feels like there's a ton of versions of that song in the vault, for some reason. They must have tried pretty hard to make it work.

This is word-for-word from the Meteora booklet, for the record. The rest of the trivia is probably the same. It's really weird to me that this song was released through this German-exclusive app. I know LP has a strong European following, but this isn't even all of Europe, it's just Germany, right? Very nice surprise to hear that it has vocals, though. Makes me wonder if there are going to be any instrumental tracks at all...

I think Phoenix is being overly optimistic. Didn't he also say in early 2020 that they were working on new music? And then last year Mike came out and said "no music, no album, no tour." I've felt since the day Chester passed that we'll never get anything truly new from LP ever again. I just don't see them figuring out a way to move on without Chester while still being Linkin Park. If anything happens, I think it'll be Mike as a solo artist with the other guys contributing to some or all songs. Maybe not even all of them, maybe just Joe and Phoenix. It just doesn't seem tenable to me to continue LP in any manner. And, if I'm being completely honest, I don't really want to see a version of LP without Chester. No, pre-Chester LP doesn't count in that - we know exactly what this band should be, and it's those six guys. I don't fault anyone at all for wanting to see LP move forward, but me personally? I'm not interested in a new configuration. So maybe I'm projecting a little bit when I say I don't think LP is coming back, but I just feel like the vibes will be off, it won't be the same, and ultimately it won't be "worth it."

Thank god, finally they're watchable again.

I'm pretty sure Mike was smart enough not to ever show the back side of the QR card, so we just need to be patient. It probably won't be active until release day anyway. Wonder what the impetus was for changing the box style for Meteora compared to HT - manufacturing costs, maybe? I think I personally prefer the "box of stuff" style rather than the photo album style, but the box still looks really nice and very thoughtfully put together. Can't wait to get mine.

I don't know that I would read much into Brad's quote at all there - he really just kind of gives a diatribe about recording Meteora and ends it with "btw this song didn't make it." Even the way he says "it was certainly part of the journey to get there" sounds completely flippant.

The fact of the matter is that there's no way to know which ones have vocals and which don't until the box is out. It's informed speculation, to a degree - Mike's pushed the first three songs on the demos disc as being the songs with full vocals, but while that doesn't necessarily mean none of the other unheard songs have vocals (or that A6 does or doesn't), we simply don't have the info either way. There's nothing wrong with playing the guessing game with it, and most of the other songs on the box seem to follow the naming pattern used for instrumental demos (single word, abstract and somewhat without meaning), but I think we need to stay away from making definitive statements about any of them that we haven't heard. No one on here's going to have inside info to that level.

I haven't listened to a Howard Stern interview in a long time, but I still wasn't really surprised that he went in the direction he did. Like others have said, that's his style, he's not interested in hitting PR talking points or having a light conversation, he pushes because that's what he's always done. He's far, far softer than he used to be, which is a definite positive - if he did this interview in 2005, for instance, it would have gone in a very different direction. As it stood, I thought that Howard approached his questions respectfully - I saw some people elsewhere suggesting that he was trying to bait Mike into badmouthing, or trying to instigate, and I don't think that was the case at all. Addiction is something that a lot of people have firsthand experience with, after all - it read to me like Howard was simply asking these questions from his point of view, the way he would see things like Chester getting completely fucked up after shows, or something like that, and he gave Mike the space to make it clear how he saw those things. The one thing I would criticize is that Howard stepped on Mike's toes pretty frequently, particularly during that section of the interview, but that's just how he is, he hears most of an answer and plows right into a follow-up the moment it comes to mind. I'd go so far as to say this is going to stand as one of the best interviews Mike will do on this promo cycle, and I'm really glad that Mike asked to be on the show. Obviously, we don't need Mike to be interrogated about Chester's demons on the regular. But I think it's something important to discuss, at least once, in an interview like this, to paint a more complete picture of the person Chester was. It was surprising to hear Mike talk so frankly about Chester's substance abuse during LP's early career, and that Chester could be a nightmare to deal with in those early days, but he was being real, and I don't think you can ask for anything more than that. The discussion on grief was enlightening, too, and Mike had some really insightful things to say on that front, especially the emphasis that the stages of grief aren't linear and aren't one-time-only affairs. Hearing that he could be angry at Chester for how he passed was really humanizing, as uncomfortable as it might have been for Mike to discuss. Howard has a dim view of depression and suicide, but I don't think there was any malice there, either, and like I said before, he gave Mike the space to clarify how he felt about it all. On a lighter note, Howard's interjections during the two premieres were pretty funny, especially his "wow"s over and over on More the Victim - it's really obvious that that really was his favorite of the three, lol.

There is no evidence. People are just throwing out wild speculation trying to tie down every title we have, as if we'll be able to put everything together before the box is out, and it leads to nonsense assertions like this. It's okay to not know things! Just relax. I think the reveal that More the Victim is the finished version of Cumulus has given people brainworms and now everyone thinks that Lost and Fighting Myself have to be finished versions of other instrumental demos. That doesn't have to be the case, guys.

It could end up on streaming, but I think the only reason we're getting this original mix is to juice sales of the deluxe CD. I bet that was easily the worst-performing part of HT20, and in Warner's eyes that's a problem. If you can easily make it more worthwhile to the diehards, why not do it? Aside from it being shitty, I guess.

I would imagine it's a variation of the instrumental from the long version, or it might just be the same instrumental straight up. The short version from LPU 2 definitely felt like a way to "salvage" the track and give it some flair to make up for it being a minute long.

After a few listens, the way I would describe how I feel is "intrigued." Kind of hard to place my feelings - it's really great to hear any unreleased Chester vocals, and he's in great form here, of course. Maybe it's the novelty of this song being unreleased, but something feels a little more experimental than the "softer" songs that made the cut for Meteora - I can maybe picture this in the track list, but as it stands, I wouldn't sub anything out for it. Think the band made the right call leaving this one off. It does make me wonder, though, why they never issued any of these proper b-sides on the singles. I know the practice was already falling out of favor by 2003, but were they really going to just leave these in the vault forever? In any case, it's just really great to hear this at all. I can't wait for the rest.

You miss the part where this video is being produced by an NFT platform, bud? I didn't say AI was a web3 thing.

A little late on this topic, but it's definitely disappointing to see that Mike's bringing the web3 shit to Linkin Park material. I would have much rather had a music video that was fully done by, you know, real people, or even just a She Couldn't-style video with photos from the era spruced up a little. Not to mention the main character of the video, according to this article, is from an "NFT-driven web series" done by the production company, so on top of everything else, including interspersing AI-affected footage of Chester from Live in Texas (weird!), this video is an ad for an NFT peddler! Gross. I can at least appreciate that Mike has a genuine interest in cutting-edge technology and how it intersects with art, but I really do not like that we're at the point of using AI-generated material to promote LP directly. That's all I've got on that.

I very much doubt it's going to be new music, if it's anything of substance at all. M20 is establishing that the demos still in the vault have immense value being sold in anniversary box sets rather than as fan club compilations or whatever, so I think a b-sides/demos thing is out. Maybe a big remix album? Or a live compilation/big-time live release, though I don't know that bands even do those any more. Honestly it's kind of stumping me what this could possibly refer to. Maybe we're getting that greatest hits album after all these years?

Discords are simply not the place for oldheads. I'm gonna make myself sound 1000 years old, but the pace of each channel is way, way too fast to keep up with - you're either right there, right that second, engaged in whatever conversation is happening, or you've missed out. No in between. ESPECIALLY for an official Discord centered around a band with a huge online presence like LP. The ephemeral nature of a Discord really bothers me, especially when you get little tidbits from the subjects of the server that are there and gone in an instant under a sea of shitposts because no one noticed that Mike posted something. The Nine Inch Nails Discord has this same problem - Trent, Atticus, and other band people will just drop in sometimes, and if you're not there for it, you better hope someone screencapped their comments, because finding them after the fact is basically hopeless. It's good for the younger fans, I suppose, to bask in an environment full of people in their age bracket rather than having to try and break through to the dinosaurs on here (me included) or, god forbid, the subreddit. But it's definitely not my preferred method of engaging in the community - I much prefer posting here once every seven months.