On the stereoA side of music with that one?
Unshatter Film Soundtrack (Live in São Paulo)
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I cried for a hundred minutes. Not in waves, not at the obvious bits — the whole way through, in a London cinema, in public, like an absolute professional.
Fair warning, I’m not going to be objective about a single word of this.
Let’s start there, because everything else I’ve got comes out of it.
I’d been waiting on Unshatter since the end of June, when they showed it to LPU members in Zurich on the last night of the From Zero tour. Months of knowing it existed and that other people had already seen it — and in all that time (almost) nobody spoiled a single thing for the rest of us. Three whole months of sitting on it. Shoutout to the Zurich lot, you absolute soldiers.
I bought my ticket for Lisbon in the August presale and let it sit in my inbox counting down. I could not wait.
Then I let opening night go on a last-minute decision, which is very unlike me to pass on.
But I also knew exactly how hard this one was going to hit, and I’ve learned what to do when I can see that coming. You don’t take it on your own. You take it the way you take a gig — with your people. Music in general is one of those things that gets so much louder when you share it with people who already understand, and that goes double for the ones that are going to hurt. I just knew this movie would be exactly this, only a thousand times worse.
So I made the call, went off the internet entirely, waited three more days, and went to London. Give it a minute, it will make sense I swear.
Saturday afternoon, October 3rd, the Odeon on Tottenham Court Road, with the people I did the whole From Zero tour with. Its own full circle, and a very good excuse to get everyone in a room again. They’d all seen it already, several times over, because nobody knows whether we’ll ever get to see this thing again. The pre-film chat quietly turned into a full support intervention for Jo, partly to annoy me in a very Hamburglars tradition, but I guess also because they just knew what was going to hit me. And then they let me sit a row in front of them… Fuckers.
I still love that lot though, even when they deserve a few punches.
Anyways.
Before we go any further: I tried to keep this spoiler free, cross my heart, and I failed. Badly. So badly. You’ve been warned and I rarely come with a warning so be glad.
Unshatter. Directed by Joe Hahn, yes, Mr Hahn in da house himself. Released by Trafalgar. Built around the two nights at Allianz Parque in São Paulo in November 2024, with studio footage going back to 2022 threaded all the way through. Companion live album out since 25 September, and no streaming release announced, which is the only bad sentence in this entire article. And this is really so bad, hear us out Linkin Park, consider this whole thing a call for help.
They didn’t have to tell that story. They told it anyway, and that choice is absolutely everything we could have wished for. And there’s only one word for what that is, so I’ll start sounding like a broken record, but eh, you’re used to that. This is a gift. Not a product, not a rollout, not content with a release date. A gift — the kind where somebody hands you something that cost them something to give.
It answers so many of the questions people have been asking for years, and then a few more you didn’t know you were carrying. It gets properly intimate and never once tips into cheapening the emotion or into voyeurism, which is a balance I genuinely don’t know how you calibrate. Glimpses of moments in time that built the whole thing, and then the key golden moments that made it hold together. The kintsugi metaphor lives right there, and the film pushes it brilliantly — the gold in the seams, not painted over them. Nothing to hide, every bump so real.
It’s not just a one in a million story. It’s a one in a million story told expertly.
I told you at the top I wouldn’t be objective. What I didn’t say is that I have no reservations either — I’m not going to manufacture a criticism so I look serious. Who wants to look serious anyway? This is also the longest thing I’ve ever put on this site, and my notes were so all over the place I decided to go with the flow rather than trying to keep a clean timeline. This might go everywhere all at once but can you blame me?
Go grab yourself some coffee, this is going to take a while. We’re going places, people, and it’s gonna be a wild ride.
Speaking of.
Emily, LOUDER.
(sorry not sorry, you know me by now.)
We all know Emily can get loud. We know what that voice does, and we know what she does to a room just by walking into it — she fills it with light, and that’s not a figure of speech, she’s just that kind of girl (sigh).
But surprisingly, she got louder through her vulnerability. Her own words, said quietly, somehow made her bigger than any note she’s ever belted. Sincerity will do that.
The film gives you her whole path in two sentences, sitting some way apart, and you don’t see the trap until it’s shut. My heart still hasn’t recovered from it thanks for asking. Early on, they’re scrolling websites full of rumours about who the new singer might be, and Emily says this about her own absence from every list:
Of course I’m not mentioned. I’ve been doing this 20 years and I’m still nobody.
And then, comes the blow:
Everything that you can think of was going on all at once. I felt like I was floating. Like time stopped. For so many years I’ve been imagining how great things could be one day and then all of a sudden you’re there. In that moment you feel euphoric.
Twenty years and still nobody. Everything I ever imagined, all at once. I hate (love) you Joe.
I was so proud of her I had to literally slide down my seat so no one could catch me bawling my eyes out. Can I love this girlie more? Apparently so.
But maybe that’s this band’s whole magic, actually. How real they are. There’s a reason they’ve been one of my favourite bands since I was a teenager, and it’s that there has never been anything faked about them. Just watch them on a stage and they give the lie to the whole “live act” label, because there’s no acting anywhere in it. There’s performance, as themselves. It’s all real, it’s all genuine, and if you’re in this fandom you already knew that. Now there’s a whole movie of it.
And I say this with nothing but love: Mike is Emily’s number one fan and he is not remotely subtle about it. It shows all throughout the movie and it’s honestly the best thing ever. A word though, mate. I need you to know you have competition. There are thousands of us, we are extremely organised, and some of us have spreadsheets.
I’ll never pass up a chance to say it again: having Emily as a frontwoman is a freaking great thing, and not only for visibility. For inspiration. That woman. I swear to god.
And then there’s the bit about daughters in the movie, which wrecked me completely, obviously (again. I know). Once again we’re in sync, we feel the same way about the same thing, and it only makes the connection worse. Or better. Same thing. Whatever.
Because here’s what that scene is actually doing, and it isn’t only about her. I’m a woman who champions women in rock, and I have two daughters I’m trying to raise so they can stand up for themselves in a world that will absolutely try to silence them, because that’s what the world does. Because this is what matters in the formative years. Young girls need to see that they’re capable of more than this world wants to let them believe, and you cannot always see a thing without examples of it. Yes, a girl can fucking rock. She can scream. She can blow her whole emotional life open on a stage in front of fifty thousand people. It was never reserved for men, it just kept getting handed to them.
I found my own voice in Sandra Nasić of Guano Apes as a young teenager and it changed my entire world. Oh, we can do that too. Nice. I never looked back. But god it took so many detours and so many songs by dudes relentlessly singing about their appendages to get there, that I’m seriously SO glad the girls coming up now won’t have to dig that hard to find the one who changes everything for them.
That was my girl power moment. Allow me at least one.
Sorry if you need to go and hide from this line, Emily, but you’re an icon, and you’re going to be one for a lot of girls who haven’t found you yet. No big deal.
Brad, and the reasons we never had
Brad’s honesty wrecked me in a different way, and this is a far bigger piece of the film than I expected going in.
Here’s the thing. We never had the full picture. We knew he wasn’t out there on the road with them, we knew there were reasons, and most of us decided a long time ago that it wasn’t ours to ask about. He had his reasons, we would have let it rest there forever, and nobody was owed a single word of explanation.
He let us in anyway. I could deflect with a shit joke right here, except he’s far better at that than I am, seemingly, so I won’t try. I’ll just say I’ll be holding onto that one for a long time.
Rob gets an explanation too, which I did not expect and which I’m grateful for. We never really had one of those either. It stays brief, and brief is fine — it’s his to keep. We hope he’s doing well.
Dave is the band dad and the film knows it
Dave sits right on the edge of going during his interview and does not go, and that destroyed me more efficiently than if he had.
But that’s one moment, and what I actually loved is that you get all of him. Every facet, the whole range, not just the steady guy in the background of everyone else’s story.
He definitely needs to do some dance TikTok challenges in the future, that’s all I’ll say.
And there’s something very fitting about that man I realised through the movie. See, bass is the most underrated job in the whole business. Nobody ever walks out of a gig humming a bass line. But it’s the thing gluing the song together underneath everything else, holding the drums and the guitars in the same room, and the only way you notice it is by taking it away and watching the lot fall over.
Watch him across this film and he is doing precisely that job for the people around him.
He is the band dad, completely and obviously, and the film never once has to point at it for you to see it. Somebody has to be the steady one while everyone else is coming apart on camera. It’s him. It’s been him for a while.
A good kind of crazy
Right, I’ve made this sound like a hundred minutes of weeping, and that’s on me, because I also laughed until my face hurt.
We know our lot. We know exactly what these people are like even when somebody’s filming, and the brilliant thing is that the film doesn’t tidy a single bit of it up. There are scenes in here that are properly, stupidly funny — the kind where you’re still wiping your eyes from the last thing and then you’re wiping them again thirty seconds later for the complete opposite reason.
Anybody watching this from the outside would conclude that this band is entirely unhinged. They would be correct. But it’s a good kind of crazy, and may they never change, because it’s the exact thing that makes the rest of it survivable.
And here’s what got me: Colin and Emily slot straight into that vibe like they’ve been at it for twenty years. Not tolerated by it. In it. Which tells you everything about why this worked — you can teach somebody the parts, you cannot teach them the daft bits. Absolute jackpot.
And speaking of Colin. He says in the film that the world is a better place with this band in it, and he’s right, and I’ll say that stands now too. But let me turn it back on him, because everybody loves Colin and the world is certainly a better place with him in it as well. Both of those sentences are true, and he only gets to say one of them.
Joe Hahn was given a concert film
Right, back to the craft before I get too sappy, except this bit is also going to get sappy, sorry in advance.
Here’s what I keep coming back to. This was meant to be a concert film. That was the whole brief — São Paulo, two nights, live release, job done. And Joe decided that wasn’t good enough, and went away and built something else entirely. Everything this film does that a concert film cannot do exists because one person refused the easy version of it.
The concert is still in there, obviously, and it’s ridiculous. The shots are insane, the sound is insane, you are in it — and I’ll go further: these are clearly the best live renders we got out of the entire tour, by a distance. The amount of work in it is absurd. I’m still not over the drums. The kit is so clear and so piercing that it sits on top of everything without flattening a single thing underneath it, and I have never heard a live mix do that in a cinema. Or anywhere. Colin, what the hell dude.
But what he built around it is the actual feat. It will catch you and it will not let go, and the second you think you can breathe again a perfectly timed detail gets you straight back. You feel the doubts. You feel the hopes taking shape in real time, which I genuinely did not know you could film. You feel the pressure and the relief like you’re standing in those rooms with them. And it never once turns into a highlight reel of other people’s worst days, which is the trap every single documentary like this falls into.
Joe — the brief was a concert. You absolute menace. You handed us a way to look straight at the hardest years this band ever had and come out the other side of them standing up. There isn’t a version of thank you that covers that, so: thank you anyway, and I’ll be waiting for some more of that in the future please and thank you.
What Mark Hoppus’s arm proves
Mark Hoppus turns up in the studio while they’re working, sits down next to Mike, and hears the track for the first time. And then he pulls his sleeve back and shows Mike his arm, because the song has given him goosebumps and he needs somebody to witness them.
Mike’s line, in the film: goosebumps can’t be faked.
That’s it. That’s the whole argument, handed over in a studio in about eleven seconds, and it’s the argument I’ve been losing in comment sections for years.
(That scene is public, by the way. I’m not spoiling anything there, I’m just refusing to shut up about it.)
It’s also, selfishly, one of my favourite parts of the film, because I’m a massive Blink fan and getting to watch this band through his eyes for a minute was its own gift. He’s us. He’s just us with better studio access and a lot more talent.
And here’s what happens to you in that cinema: you spend the entire film doing exactly what Mark Hoppus did in that studio. A visceral, physical reaction and goosebumps that do not stop. Mine ran from the first frame to the last.
Your body answers before you’ve decided anything. Nobody asks Mark Hoppus whether he’s earned the right to react like that. Nobody tells him he didn’t know the song well enough.
Funny how that question only ever gets asked of some of us.
On grieving people you never met
Let’s take a little U turn out of the blue here but I swear it’s for good reasons. I hate people who judge you for mourning an artist. You didn’t even know them. What do you mean I didn’t know them? They’ve been one of my longest friendships. They were there when nobody else was. They carried me through every single up and down I’ve had, for most of the years I’ve been alive, because sometimes music is genuinely all you have, and that isn’t a sad sentence, it’s just a true one.
I’m not delusional. Of course I didn’t know them. But I knew the version of themselves they built and dedicated to us, and I loved that version, and when it goes it leaves a hole, and that hole has a right to grief. Judgment or not.
So yes. I’ll assert it. The feelings we’ve been through are also ours. Same reaction, same arm, and nobody is asking Mark Hoppus for his receipts.
A heart that grieves is a heart that loves, and a heart that does that always has room for more. Which is maybe why so many of us made the probably-unconscious decision to love and protect Emily and Colin at all costs. Fiercely even. They’re filling that space. They’re part of the reason any of this came back to us at all, and some of us know, right down in the bones, how much we owe those two. Cherry on top really, the missing ingredient in the magic turned out to be two extremely fine human beings, on every level. I’m so glad.
We talk all the time about the odds of finding the right people, the ones who actually make the magic happen. They bring it up in the movie and they’re being so humble about this part. This band didn’t just beat them once. They beat them twice, and because of this film we get to watch the second one land almost in real time. It takes good people to find good people in my book, so there’s also that.
Now this next bit, I’ve rewritten more times than anything else in this article, so bear with me.
I can’t picture this band any other way now. Colin and Emily aren’t the new ones anymore — they are Linkin Park. That’s a strange thing to catch yourself thinking after all those years, and a stranger thing to type out where people can read it.
But maybe that’s what moving forward actually looks like. Not a swap. Just arriving somewhere you can hold every bit of what you had, exactly as it was, and still have your heart open for so much more coming. And if anything, Unshatter proves it.
And the silver screen turns into a mirror
What makes the whole thing land as true rather than as a nice story is that it keeps answering itself. Moments rhyme with moments, years apart, and you catch them a half-second after they’ve already got you.
I’ll take one, or we’ll be here all night. The little box Mike and Emily step onto. Mike says it himself, in the film:
We got on stage together at this practice, that’s what it looks like, that’s what it feels like. You and me the other day jumped on that little box together yesterday, did that part of that song together, that’s the first time that we’ve done that and it felt like for a second like oh this is just so fucking weird… And then I was like, it was great. It’s just uncomfortable because it’s new. We’re gonna have to get used to it.
Strange, and also it works. That’s exactly what all of us felt too. Every single one of us had that identical two-step and most of us never said it out loud.
And then there’s the livestream.
The pressure in that stretch of the film is at a level I was not prepared for, and it is so well cut that I was tense in a cinema seat about an event I watched live and already know the ending of. That’s the most bonkers part of this whole movie, we know how it ends and yet we’re bracing for impact every second of it. Genius.
Then the release. The moment they walk on. I don’t know how many more times Mike can make me bawl my eyes out with that stupid (so not stupid) it’s good to see you again — which was Dave’s idea, by the way, so it’s really Dave’s line — but it worked again, in a cinema, two years later, with no excuse whatsoever. I had to retreat in my hoodie for this one and hoped my sobbing would be somewhat muffled.
Everything happened for us fans that day, all at once, straight in the face. The return. The new song. The album announcement. Colin and Emily introduced to the world. Every bit of the work and the doubt and the hope landing in the same fifteen minutes. A true shock to the system.
Living it again from this angle is somehow more powerful than living it the first time, and I don’t fully understand how that’s possible. I’m fine. Everything is fine. Again. What the fuck.
Mike is in all of it and none of it is his
We’re used to Mike. He’s the one who talks — the voice on the interviews, the one who explains this band to the world, and he’s always completely himself doing it. Always so real, always so him. It feels like no version of this man is kept for the camera.
So no, he didn’t surprise me in this film. Not once. He is exactly the person I have always taken him for, and I want to be clear that this is the compliment and not the consolation prize. In a film built entirely on people being honest, the man everybody thought they already knew turning out to be precisely that man is the hardest thing in here to fake, and he doesn’t even appear to be trying.
He’s generous with it, too. You feel it in the way he hands his own feelings over — not performed, not managed, just given to you to hold. Except the subjects in this one hit hard, and some of the sentences coming out of his mouth are not easy ones to sit through.
The bit where he talks about the limits of his own voice got me square in the chest.
But here’s what I actually loved, and it took me a while to work out why it mattered so much to me. He’s at equal volume with everybody else in this film. Same weight, same airtime, same floor. The man whose whole job is being the voice of this band stepped out of that chair and sat back down as one member of it. Nobody made him do that. You can feel the decision in the edit.
And once you’ve seen it you can’t stop seeing it. Go back over everything I’ve told you. Mark Hoppus gets the goosebumps — Mike is the one sitting beside him, and the line that makes sense of the entire scene is his. Emily steps onto that little box — Mike is up there with her, and the words are his, about something that belongs to the two of them. The band walks back out in front of the world — and the line that takes me apart comes out of Mike’s mouth, except it was Dave’s idea, and I said so, because that’s the truth of it.
He’s in all of it. Not one bit of it is about him.
That isn’t the edit being clever. That’s him being generous, which is the thing he’s been doing all along — this time with a camera running.
This man. You just want to give him an enormous hug, honestly.
The last five minutes
We made it through. Not that I was waiting for the end — but we reached it, and I’m glad I didn’t drown in the puddle of tears I’ve become.
Starting to breathe again and… Joe the menace is back.
The film proper ends on the band from behind, on the stage in São Paulo, and then From Zero comes up on the screen. They did it. From zero. Guess what? Yeah. Consider me obliterated, Joe. Good job.
And this is the bit that got me on the way back, because From Zero the album already goes full circle through that choir, and here the film does the same thing to the entire era. A proper ending for what was. Everything closed, nothing shut.
Then it refuses to let you leave.
Mike raps the verse of A Place For My Head. Then Joe, over the top of it:
When we started the band, it started with friends getting together talking about life… enjoying the music. Finding ways to express ourselves. Turning goofiness into “woah that was cool” and imagining where that could take us.
And then — last thing, after everything, after all of it — the Xero footage. A Place For My Head in its demo shape, live. Chester there, a baby. Rob behind him.
The actual instant zero, handed to you on the way out the door.
What the fuck is wrong with you. Broke me clean in two.
Joe. Mr Joe Hahn. We need to talk my man. That’s not editing. That’s a trap with a bow on it.
Impossible until it is done
Mandela’s words sat in my head the whole way back. Impossible until it is done. And that is precisely, literally what they did.
Linkin Park isn’t just the phoenix rising out of its own ashes. They took everything that made them and turned it into a different mythical animal altogether — bigger, stranger, and still unmistakably theirs. They didn’t write a new chapter, they started a whole new series, and there’s no ceiling on how many stories fit inside it. Stepped through a portal, as Emily put it, and came out somewhere with no edges.
That’s not a band being put back together. That’s the human capacity to reinvent yourself into the best available version of what you could be, caught on camera. Borrow it the next time you doubt you can do a thing.
The tour healed a lot of us and this film does the same work. No questions left unanswered. And not just healing but a renewed sense of hope for this band and, by proxy, for this fandom.
We never actually disappeared, but look at us now, making plans two years out just in case we get to be in the same room again.
People who found a voice, worked for it, and then took the leap that would make everything happen. Good things happening to good people at fucking last.
I could do this forever. I’m not being cute about it — there are five thousand words up there and I am still sitting on moments I haven’t touched. I never shut up about this band at the best of times, and this is very much the best of times. So this is me shutting up on purpose, which I’d like noted, because it is not a thing I do.
Which is funny, as it goes, because that’s the other thing nobody warns you about. You don’t walk out of this one and debrief either. You look at each other, you breathe out, somebody says fucking hell — probably me — and that’s the entire conversation for a while, because the emotions need a minute to settle down and everybody knows it. That’s also why I left those notes stew for over a week, you need to process it all. You just look at each other and you understand each other. Some of the Hamburglars still had red eyes, on their third or fourth time through.
And standing in that lobby I talked to someone who doesn’t do fandoms at all, who doesn’t even get the parasocial thing and has told me so to my face, and their entire reaction was: damn, you just want to be friends with these people.
One in a million, and it clicks. Turns out it works from outside too.
Which is what I want to say to anyone filing this under fan object. It isn’t only a gift to us. It’s a gift that travels a lot further than this community — a story of resilience, a story of grief, a story of healing. This world needs more of those.
What was lost has been found and rebuilt into something that works.
Here’s the thing I’ve known for years and have never managed to write down properly. Anything you share with other people arrives at a completely different level. It’s bigger, it’s truer, and it stays with you a hell of a lot longer. That’s the entire reason we do any of this — why we buy a ticket for a show we could stream from the sofa, why we drive four hours to stand in a field with strangers, why I let a Lisbon ticket go to waste so I could sit in a London cinema with my people.
Which is what I meant, right at the top, about them choosing to tell it. That choice isn’t just brave, it’s the thing that makes the whole film work — because a story handed over is a different object from a story kept. They gave us theirs. That’s why it hits the way it does, and that’s why I’ll still be carrying it around in a year.
And that’s exactly why I’m hoping very hard, with everything I’ve got, that it gets made available somewhere at some point — stranger things have happened. If anyone ever asks me about this band again I’m just sending them this, with a side of Waiting For The End live. Oh wait. Already included.
The Emptiness Machine was the song they chose to come back with. And gave us that one line to hold onto: “I only wanted to be part of something.” Two years on, they’ve used every bit of power they had to make sure we got to be part of everything. At least, walking out of that cinema, it sure feels like it.
Unreal.
And maybe that’s the gift nobody saw coming in all of this. Joe has said he wanted it to be gratifying for the fans who stuck around with us for all these years, and I’d argue he undersold it. They handed us the story, which puts us inside it somewhere. Not on the screen. In it. I’ve never come across another connection that works quite like this one.
You walk out of that viewing wanting to give them the biggest hug.
And then you realise that’s exactly what you were just given.
I waited three months. I let an opening night rot in my inbox. I pushed it back on a last minute decision and then went to another country for a Saturday afternoon in a cinema.
In The End, it didn’t even matter — look, it was sitting right there, I’m only human — it was hella worth it.
Can’t wait for what’s next. Thank you, Linkin Park.
And a proper thank you to all the people who actually built this thing. You made something that’s going to outlive all of us.
