Review: Linkin Park overcomes tragedy in first Minneapolis show with new female singer

Linkin Park, a band that was already working its way back from one tragedy, faced down another devastating situation at its concert Wednesday night in Minneapolis just hours after the city was rocked by a deadly school shooting.

The hip-hop-infused California alt-metal band — a big act for millennials and Gen Zers, and still popular with angsty teens — is on its first major tour since its lead singer, Chester Bennington, died by suicide in 2017.

The group made a bold choice to return at all. Then it made an even more daring decision to replace Bennington with a female singer, Emily Armstrong, a move initially greeted with skepticism and backlash.

With all that for a backdrop, Linkin Park dramatically carried through with its scheduled performance Wednesday at Target Center. Its two-hour show offered about 10,000 fans the cathartic rock ‘n’ roll therapy that always permeated its music but came through especially loud and clear on this night.

After heavily steamrolling the crowd nonstop for the first 45 minutes with incendiary early-2000s blazers such as “Crawling” and “Points of Authority,” the band’s six members suddenly cooled off after the 2010 single “Waiting for the End.” That’s when co-founding co-vocalist Mike Shinoda addressed the tragedy that happened earlier in the day, five miles from the arena at Annunciation Catholic School.

Shinoda started by mentioning how the group’s new album, “From Zero,” was “about picking up after a tragedy.”

“There was a tragedy in this city today,” the band’s resident rapper continued. “We want to dedicate our set tonight to the loving, strong, resilient city of Minneapolis. We hope a positive night of music can bring the city together during a dark time.”

Pulled from Dead Sara, another Southern California hard-rock band, the 39-year-old Armstrong demonstrated her throat-scorching vocal power and ability to rage right away in the opening song, “Somewhere I Belong,” one of Bennington’s bleakest old favorites.

“I wanna heal / I wanna feel / What I thought was never real,” she sang with a ferocity that not only rivaled the late singer but really any other hard-rock vocalist.

Never coming off like she was trying to imitate Bennington — which may have been the point of recruiting a woman — Armstrong let Shinoda do all the talking between songs but nonetheless stood out as the star of the show all night.

She demonstrated a broad range and melodic depth in the more power-ballad-like oldie “The Catalyst” (which fans lit up with their cell phones). Conversely, she sounded downright hair-raising as she venomously screeched her way through “Faint” at the end of the show.

Most of the fans at the basketball arena seemed to approve of the replacement singer. Or they at least didn’t seem to mind singing (and sometimes screaming) along with her as her new bandmates blazed through other fan faves such as “Numb” and “In the End,” the surviving Linkin Park members themselves all sounding renewed and electrified by her. A powerful rock singer still can do that.