“I’d have to stop, gather myself, get through two lines, start crying, leave the room, come back in”: When Linkin Park exposed a different side of themselves with Breaking The Habit

With the release of Hybrid Theory in 2000, Linkin Park became the poster boys for a scene they didn’t even like. The six-piece’s landmark debut distilled nu metal into its purest, rawest, catchiest form and instantly reaped the rewards, reaching the top five in 18 national charts and spawning four generation-spanning singles. The only issue was everybody else in the genre.

“What we didn’t like about what was going on in the scene was that it was very frat rock,” guitarist/vocalist Mike Shinoda told Vulture in 2023. “It was toxic masculinity. We didn’t know the term yet. We just didn’t like how everything was about tough-guy shit, and we didn’t identify with tough-guy shit.”

As it turned out, nu metal wasn’t big enough to contain Linkin Park’s ambitions, and Breaking The Habit was the first indication of their transcendent dreams. It was a standout song from the band’s long-awaited second effort, 2003’s Meteora, in large part because it sounded so different from everything else. Rather than a rapping rager, it was a propulsive alt-rock anthem, built around an undistorted guitar riff and tender vocals from the late Chester Bennington.

In 2003, Shinoda revealed that he’d been chipping away at the song since 1998, meaning that it even pre-dated some of the material on Hybrid Theory. “Well, five years ago or something, I tried to write this other song that never came together,” he told ShoutWeb. “I had tried it 20 different times and it never worked because it was always cheesy or it was too dark or it was too melodramatic or something and I always ended up scrapping it.”

Breaking the Habit (Official Music Video) [HD UPGRADE] – Linkin Park - YouTube

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But, when Shinoda revisited the track in preparation for Meteora, it took shape in a matter of hours. He continued: “I couldn’t believe it. I mean, this is a song I had been trying to write for five years and it just came together in two hours. It was amazing.”

Despite how musically different Breaking The Habit was to the rest of Linkin Park’s output at the time, the lyrics were just as raw and personal as the ones on Hybrid Theory. Bennington wore his depression, trauma and substance use on his sleeve throughout the debut, leading many fans to believe that this song – with lines like, ‘I don’t want to be the one the battles always choose’ – was about him hoping to get clean. Shinoda seemed to corroborate this in an MTV interview in 2014, implying that it was about what it was like for him to watch his bandmate struggle with addiction.

“That was the toughest part: having the guts to go up to him and say, ‘You’re hurting yourself and I care, and if you can’t stop it, we can’t keep doing this,’” he said. “‘I can’t make you change, you’ve got to figure it out, and I really want you to.’”

However – talking on The Zach Sang Show in 2023, six years after Bennington passed away – the musician changed his tune. He said that Breaking The Habit was actually about the pain of him losing touch with a once-dear friend.

“People mistake that as a song about addiction – it’s actually not,” he said. “There was a friend that I had and then, out of nowhere, they stopped talking [to me], when we were in college. He got new friends and stopped talking to me. He tried to talk to me later. Ha ha! He was like, ‘Yo, I heard your band on the radio, man,’ and it was really corny.”

Whatever the true inspiration was, when Shinoda presented the lyrics to the rest of the band, Bennington was deeply moved. He saw himself and his struggles in the words about fighting what seemed to be a losing battle, and talking to MTV, he said that he burst into tears as he read them. He had a similarly emotional response in the studio, as well.

“I felt like he was writing about my life,” the singer explained. “The song was very hard for me to record. I get all teared-up thinking about it right now. I’d have to stop, gather myself, get through two lines, start crying, leave the room, come back in. I was like, ‘I can’t do this.’”

Meteora came out on March 25, 2003, and Breaking The Habit was the fifth and final single from the album. It hit radio and TV in June 2004, accompanied by a high-production, anime music video directed by Linkin Park’s Joe Hahn. In a 2003 MTV interview, Hahn – who also directed the videos for fellow Meteora singles Somewhere I Belong, Numb and From The Inside – said that he felt filmmaking was his true calling, while music was “more of an extra thing”.

Commercially, Breaking The Habit was the second-biggest hit from Meteora, reaching number 20 on the Billboard Hot 100. It went on to become one of the band’s most-played songs live. At time of publication, it’s been performed 425 times, and it remains a part of the setlist following Bennington’s death, sung by new vocalist Emily Armstrong.

For Linkin Park, Breaking The Habit destroyed boundaries. The way it expanded beyond nu metal set the stage for everything they did next, with subsequent albums Minutes To Midnight and A Thousand Suns exploring more downtempo sounds and electronic influence. Considering the band didn’t fade away with the genre they initially called home in the early 2000s, that can only be a good thing.

“None of us would claim that we broke all the boundaries between genres, but we played a role in breaking the boundaries between genres,” Shinoda told Kerrang! Radio in 2021. “When I was a kid, if someone asked: ‘What’s your favourite type of music?’, you had the answer: it was rap or it was metal, and it was a certain type of metal. ‘Do you listen to this too?’ ‘No. To hell with it.’ It was so serious. And now people don’t even think about it.”