LOS ANGELES – Enough time has passed since his band’s first record that Linkin Park singer Mike Shinoda has reached the stage of his career at which his children’s friends are shocked to learn he was in one of the biggest bands of the 2000s.

“The reactions are hysterical,” the 45-year-old musician said in a video interview from his home studio in Los Angeles. He offered a knowing smile about what it meant that it had taken so long.

“I think we gradually got comfortable with being elder statesmen,” he said about being discovered by the next generation. “But I’m really grateful for the respect that the band is enjoying from younger people, whether it’s fans or people who are making music.”

American rock group Linkin Park have not released a new album since May 2017 – two months before its other frontman, Chester Bennington, died by suicide at 41.

But, while assembling material for a 20th-anniversary reissue of the band’s second album Meteora, Shinoda came upon something fans have not heard before: a handful of unreleased, close-to-complete songs that have sat in the group’s archives for two decades.

The first of those tracks, Lost – built around Bennington’s passionate vocals and released last Friday – was pulled from one of Shinoda’s dormant hard drives.

“Everything came back,” he said about rediscovering the track. “I remembered us having this conversation about which songs should make the cut.”

Lost, which was fully recorded and mixed in 2003, was ultimately left off Meteora because it was similar to Numb, an album single that reached No. 11 on the Billboard chart and has 1.9 billion YouTube views.

Today, it serves as an example of Bennington’s potent talents during the band’s commercial peak. Meteora went seven-times platinum and the band’s 2000 debut, Hybrid Theory, has an RIAA diamond certification for sales over 10 million.

“He could take that thing he was singing and just sledgehammer it through somebody’s heart,” Shinoda said with reverence. “I’ve grown to appreciate what we had even more because it’s hard to get that. I work with people where I go, ‘Oh, can you sing it this way?’ And they just can’t.”

Brad Delson, the band’s guitarist, called Lost a “surprise gift” from Bennington. “The performance is so beautiful, delicate and clear,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot of great Chester vocals, and this is among the best.”

The band also revived two nearly completed songs: Fighting Myself, which Shinoda finished mixing in 2022 and called “a definitive Linkin Park track”; and More The Victim, released in a version that is “basically the furthest we got with it, in terms of a demo”.

Shinoda said Fighting Myself received a light touch during the mixing process to preserve its period authenticity.

“I really wanted to keep it true to the initial intention, because I didn’t want to taint this time warp,” he said. “What I love about the three new songs is that all of them represent a different facet of the band as it was in 2003.”

The super deluxe version of the Meteora reissue, due April 7, features Work In Progress, a collection of edited tour footage shot by the band’s in-house videographer Mark Fiore, who captured what Shinoda called “weird, fly-on-the-wall stuff”.

The boxed set also includes five previously unreleased full-length concert recordings, taken from a period when the band were constantly on tour at stadiums and arenas around the world.

Shinoda said that assembling the Meteora set inspired different feelings from those of the Hybrid Theory anniversary, which the band marked in 2020 with a similar boxed set. “We were still processing Chester’s passing at the time we were putting that stuff together,” he said. “Now, the tone for me was much more celebratory.”

No version of Linkin Park has played live since a 2017 tribute concert to Bennington, where his vocals were sung by a committee of guest musicians including Jonathan Davis of Korn, Machine Gun Kelly and Alanis Morissette.

There are no plans for the band to stage a similar performance or record without Bennington. “I don’t think we can predict that,” Shinoda said.

“You have to let things travel in whatever direction. If and when it’s the right time, that’ll occur to us.”

But the process of assembling the reissue has provided another means of considering how Bennington may have wanted the band to proceed without him.

In particular, Shinoda said he “felt confident” that the late singer would have endorsed these expanded editions.

“Historically, he was always way more bullish about putting out stuff,” he said.

“A typical Chester reaction would have been, ‘Why not just make the album 15 songs?’ When I thought about that, it was very reassuring.” NYTIMES