Chester Bennington’s tragic death on July 20th, 2017, shocked the world and devastated millions of fans who are still mourning the loss of the much-missed vocalist three years on. ‘Numb’ is perhaps the most commercially successful Linkin Park song and after hearing this isolated vocal version by their late leader which is nothing short of remarkable.
‘Numb’ arrived as an incredible success for the band, the track topping the Billboard Alternative Songs chart for 12 weeks running. The song spent six weeks at the top of the chart in 2003 and six weeks in 2004. The material also spent three weeks at the top of Billboard’s Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart and even peaked at number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100. As of July 2020, the song has achieved over 1.4 billion views and 8million likes on YouTube. If that success wasn’t enough, a remixed version of the featuring Jay Z also won Best Collaboration at the Grammy’s.
Meteora, the album which ‘Numb’ originally featured on, was also a commercial love-in which topped the charts in the UK and US with the record selling over 27 million copies across the globe to date. Linkin Park had cemented themselves as one of the biggest groups on the planet following this album and sitting on cloud nine.
Speaking of the record, Bennington is on record as stating: “We knew what we wanted, and we knew how to execute to a certain degree. However, we were also just going for it. We didn’t really care about what anybody else was doing. We also didn’t care whether or not the songs fit together stylistically as a whole or a collection of songs. It was more like, ‘This riff is sick!’ Then, we’d just scream over it, and the next song would be a mid-tempo ballad and you’d sing the way that song needed to be sang.”
Adding: “We were testing. We were students in college. We were in the lab, and we happened to stumble across something everybody liked and it worked. I think Meteora was an extension of that.”
This vocal performance from Bennington on ‘Numb’ is jawdropping and heartbreaking in equal measure, it’s undoubtedly the band’s magnum opus which captures them at the peak of their powers which is a befitting remembrance of one of the most loved frontmen of the 21st-century that is truly missed.
Listen to the incredible audio footage, below.
