In the mid-Nineties, Chester Bennington fronted a grungy Arizona band called Grey Daze that split up around the time that he joined Linkin Park. Now, two years after the singer’s death, the band will be putting out its first widely released record, which contains vocals Bennington recorded as a teenager.
The first single, “What’s in the Eye,” finds the 17-year-old Bennington crooning and screaming over a moody mix of murky clean guitar and pile-driving riffs: “Don’t go too fast, my friend/Before you lose control.”
The as-yet-untitled LP — which contains reworked recordings from the group’s independently released records (a project Bennington got behind shortly before his death) — will come out in the spring.
“Over the years we’d become more knowledgeable, more experienced and had more resources, so we decided to pick a selection of songs from our previously released albums and re-record them the way they deserved to have been treated back in the Nineties when we initially wrote and released them,” the group’s surviving members said in a joint statement. “By February 2017, we started recording and in June, Chester and Sean [Dowdell] announced the reunion, with a live performance planned for that fall. Unfortunately, as we all know, that never happened.”
Bennington wrote the lyrics for “What’s in the Eye” with the group’s drummer, Dowdell; the song recalls a friend of theirs who died in a car accident. The band, which was active between 1993 and 1996, reworked it for this release with producers Chris Traynor (Bush, Helmet), Kyle Hoffman (Rob Zombie, Escape the Fate) and Jay Baumgardner (Papa Roach, Coal Chamber).
An exact release date for the album has yet to be announced.