Rocking on

Linkin Park performs at a concert of The Hunting Party Tour. [Photo/China Daily]

"Every song comes together differently. In the band, Mike (Shinoda) is definitely our principal songwriter when it comes to music. Mike and Chester (Bennington) do a great job collaborating lyrically. But we do have the openness and the ability for every band member to bring in ideas and have those be heard," says the band's bassist, David Farrell.

Founded in 1996 in California, the band has won two Grammy Awards and sold more than 60 million albums worldwide.

Having been together for nearly 20 years, the band continues to push boundaries: The Hunting Party is considered "the rawest, most aggressive album" Linkin Park has made in years.

"The trigger was when Mike switched gears about not wanting to write the songs that he'd been writing," the band's leading vocalist Chester Bennington says, "but instead decided to write heavy hard rock songs we had grown up listening to."

In China, the band has won a wider audience thanks to their songs used in both Transformers in 2007 and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen in 2009.

According to Yong Le Live, a Beijing-based ticket company that joined with top live entertainment company Live Nation to launch Linkin Park's 2015 China tour, the total investment for this tour is about 80 million yuan and on the first day after the ticket presale was announced on May 7, the box office soared up to more than 24 million yuan.

The band founded Music For Relief in 2005, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing aid to victims of natural disasters and the prevention of such disasters. So far, MFR has raised more than $7 million for victims of various disasters across four continents. One US dollar of every ticket sold for the band's The Hunting Party Tour will be donated to the MFR fund.

The idea of MRF started from a desire to help in different areas that the band had seen following the Asian tsunami in 2004.

"We were touring in the region previous to that, and familiar with some spots we were seeing on TV when that happened. We wanted to figure out a way to mobilize not only ourselves, not only our fans, but hopefully the music community in general," Farrell says.

IF YOU GO

8 pm, July 22. Shanghai Hongkou Football Stadium, 444 Dong Jiangwan Lu (Road), Hongkou district, Shanghai.

7:30 pm, July 26. Beijing Workers' Stadium, Gongti Beilu (North road), Chaoyang district, Beijing.

Call at 4008-101-887 for tickets.