Guilty All The Same

Album: The Hunting Party (2014)
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Songfacts®:

  • The first single from Linkin Park's sixth album was debuted on March 6, 2014 through the music app Shazam. The song was made available for listening to anyone who "Shazamed" any of the band's previous tracks. A month previously, Wiz Khalifa had become the first artist to premiere a track on Shazam when he debuted "We Dem Boyz" on the music identification service.
  • Co-frontman Mike Shinoda told Radio.com: "The reason we went with this single first is that we think it's a good look into the DNA of the record that we're putting out this summer."

    "A few months ago I was making some demos and writing this stuff and it sounded like something that you could play on the radio," he continued. "I listen to a lot of indie music… and I was listening to the demos and thought, I don't want to make any of that music. What is it that's not out there right now that I'm all about, that I'm fired up about that is a void? It ended up being this new material."
  • The hard rocking six-minute track features an epic intro and some intense Chester Bennington vocals centering on pointing the finger when it comes to blame. Halfway into the tune, rapper Rakim steps in to spit a few rhymes in which he questions the path some take to accumulate wealth. "That's like one of my idols," commented Shinoda. "If you get into the nitty-gritty of his rhyme pattern and the topic in this song, it's bananas what he is doing. He's on the some Steve Vai s--t vocally."
  • Rakim is best known for the hip-hop classics he recorded as one half of the duo Eric B. & Rakim in the late '80s and early '90s. They include "I Know You Got Soul" and "Paid In Full."
  • The song's music clip is an interactive six-minute video game that was created in the Windows/Xbox game-maker program Project Spark. Speaking with Billboard magazine, the band's DJ and sampler Joe Hahn explained that the idea for the visual came after he attended the 2013 video game convention, E3. "I saw this cool demo for Project Spark, and it just blew my mind," he said. "For me, the next step was to see if we could showcase our next song as a game instead of a video."
  • For The Hunting Party, the band's sixth studio album, Linkin Park left behind the electronic influence of their two previous albums and tapped back into the nu-metal sound that defined their style on their first two albums, Hybrid Theory and Meteora. But the band had grown a lot in the 14 years since their debut and, Mike Shinoda told Rolling Stone, it showed. "We're not 18-year-old kids making a loud record - we're 37-year-old adults making a loud record," he explained. "And what makes a 37-year-old angry is different than what made us angry back in the day."

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