Live Review: Linkin Park - Wembley Stadium, London 28/06/2025
Linkin Park. Wembley Stadium. Fucking finally.
It’s wild that in the 25 years since Hybrid Theory dropped — the multi-platinum, genre-defining debut that blew everything open — Linkin Park had never played Wembley Stadium. The O2, sure, multiple times. Headlining Donington’s Download? Twice. But never Wembley.
Until now.
As of June 2025, that long-standing omission has been put to bed — and with 90,000 people packed into the capital’s biggest venue for the band’s largest-ever headliner, it was worth the wait.
But first, the supports.
JPEGMAFIA kicked things off with what he dubbed “thirty minutes of bullshit” — a storm of noise, swagger, and sweat. Dressed in a velvet jacket (god knows how he survived the heat), he tore through the likes of ‘Jesus Forgive Me, I Am a Thot’, ‘SIN MIEDO’, and BALD!, dedicated with mock solemnity to the follicly-challenged in the crowd. ‘PROTECT THE CROSS’ was a highlight, Hendricks’ voice climbing from drawl to roar in seconds.
Even if the sun-baked audience couldn’t quite give him the chaos he deserved, it was an electrifying start.
Then came Spiritbox, Canadian metal’s darlings, unleashing ‘Tsunami Sea’ in a roiling wave of sound that echoed like thunder across Wembley. Courtney LaPlante’s mix of guttural growls and ethereal softness rang out over the thousands packed in, her grin flickering between awe and “what the fuck are we doing here?” disbelief. ‘Perfect Soul’ shimmered, ‘Jaded’ and ‘The Void’ churned with catharsis, and a particularly obedient pigeon descended from above as Courtney demanded a circle pit. Only ‘Circle With Me’ and ‘Holy Roller’ truly got Wembley going, but by the time they closed with ‘Soft Spine’, ‘No Loss, No Love’, and ‘Cellar Door’, the stadium was shaken — possibly more than it had ever been.
And then: Linkin Park.
After emerging to Susan Boyle’s cover of ’I Dreamed A Dream’— you haven’t lived until hearing tens of thousands of metalheads butcher the Les Misérables anthem — a slow bleed into ‘Somewhere I Belong’ marked the start proper, with Emily Armstrong stepping into the light in sunglasses and near-parody nonchalance. As her voice tore into the chorus, echoed by thousands upon thousands of adoring voices, it felt like Linkin Park were finally back where they belonged.
The early airing of an audience-led ‘Crawling’ felt like a bloodletting of emotion, Emily’s harrowing scream drawing it to a close, while ‘Cut The Bridge’ and ‘Up From The Bottom’ gave the UK it’s first proper tastes of the ‘From Zero’ instant classics. Even a brief pause as Mike Shinoda read out a message in a ‘native tongue’ butchering of the Cockney accent — “Oi! It’s a crackin’ night for a fuckin’ show, innit?” — let the night feel like the band you know and love.
There were moments of real poignancy: Emily stepping into Skylar Grey’s shoes for ‘Where’d You Go’ with delicate mournfulness; a particularly, beautifully brittle 'Castle of Glass’; ‘Two Faced’, her guttural roar now arguably as definitive as anything from Chester’s prime. Joe Hahn’s scratch solo leading into a tightly-woven medley of Shinoda-led classics, ‘When They Come For Me’/ ‘Until It Breaks’ / ‘Remember The Name’, the instrumental crescendo building into a stunning sensory overload.
But, unfortunately, something still hung unspoken over it all.
By the time ‘Casualty’ bled into ‘One Step Closer’, the air felt heavier. ‘Lost’, reimagined with a tender acoustic intro, lit up the crowd in phone torches, but its emotional weight made Chester’s absence glaring. There being no mention at all felt… odd. And, when you compare that to The Prodigy’s moving tribute to Keith Flint at Glastonbury the next day, it felt like something had been deliberately sidestepped.
There was a hell of a lot of joy in display, sure: ‘What I’ve Done’, ‘Numb’, ‘In The End’, all received with full-throated worship. It was a beautiful sight, and a hell of a show. You just couldn’t help but find it a little empty at times.
By the time the encore arrived, and the procession of ‘Faint’ (with a teasing snippet of ‘Paint It Black’ buried in the outro), ‘Papercut’, ‘A Place For My Head’, ‘Heavy Is The Crown’, and ‘Bleed It Out’ eked out the last dregs of energy, it was impossible to miss the joyous exhaustion on everyone’s sweaty, spent faces. But, as bodies flooded toward the exits, attempting in vain to beat the tube station crush, it still felt like it could have been just that bit more.
Words by James O’Sullivan
Photo Credit: Ed Mason + radnomadvisuals
