See Steve Aoki, Mike Shinoda Save the World in New Video
For their second collaboration together, Steve Aoki and Linkin Park have gone sonically and visually bigger. Watch the intensely dystopian clip for “Darker Than Blood,” off Aoki’s May album Neon Future II.
“This time we brought more of the emotional side to our music with dark lyrics and soaring vocals from the Linkin Park camp and an anthemic drop to suit the track,” Aoki tells Rolling Stone. “The music video is along the same lines. Me and Mike Shinoda are in the future trying to save [people from] a virus that kills off the human race in the past.”
The clip, conceptualized by Aoki, recalls 28 Days Later, with the virus creating a zombie-like world. Equipped with plenty of futuristic gadgets, but not enough time, Aoki and Shinoda try to assist doctors with curing the newly violent patients who have been infected. In the end, a young patient who is the first to be successfully cured turns out to be a young Aoki.
Previously, the EDM artist and nu-metal band had joined forces on the 2013 track “A Light That Never Comes,” which appeared on their 2013 remix album Recharged. “Darker Than Blood” had been one of Aoki’s first previews of his third studio album which features contributions from Snoop Lion, Rivers Cuomo and Lost creator J.J. Abrams, the latter offering a brief but ominous speech on the album’s outro “Warp Speed.”
As for Linkin Park, the band had to cancel their tour after singer Chester Bennington sustained a leg injury earlier this year. Bennington has since recovered and the band performed alongside Snoop Dogg and System of a Down at Canada’s Amnesia Rockfest. This week, the band’s co-frontman/multi-instrumentalist Shinoda relaunched his hip-hop side project Fort Minor and released the lighthearted single “Welcome.”