Emily Armstrong, the Dead Sara Lifer Linkin Park Bet Its Comeback On

Emily Armstrong

Photo: Warner Records / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 6, 1986 Los Angeles
Occupation	Singer
Awards	American Music Award for Favorite Rock Song — The Emptiness Machine

Emily Armstrong sums up her working life in a single sentence: she has been in one band her whole life, and that is pretty much all she knows. That band was Dead Sara, the Los Angeles rock group she started as a teenager with the guitarist Siouxsie Medley and kept alive through two major labels and years of releasing records itself. The band she now fronts is Linkin Park, whose songs she has spent two years singing to crowds that knew every word before she arrived. Talking about Unshatter, Joe Hahn’s film about the group’s return, she put into words the question most of those crowds asked first: what makes you think you could do this?

The answer begins in Los Angeles, the city where Armstrong was born on May 6, 1986, to parents who were prominent members of the Church of Scientology, and where she was raised inside it. She was writing songs on guitar at 11 and singing by 15, and left high school because the only future she wanted was a rock band. In 2002 a mutual friend introduced her to Medley, a year younger. They bonded over Nirvana and L7 as much as over older folk and classic rock, and Joni Mitchell’s open and alternate tunings shaped what Guitar World would later call the band’s signature sound.

The pair first played as Epiphany, at The Mint in March 2005, with Armstrong on bass. The new name came from a misheard lyric: in Fleetwood Mac’s “Sara,” Stevie Nicks sings “said Sara,” and the two teenagers heard “dead Sara.” Before the band had an album, older singers were paying attention. Courtney Love brought Armstrong to New York to sing on Hole’s Nobody’s Daughter, and Grace Slick, asked by The Wall Street Journal in 2011 which contemporary singers she admired, named her.

“Weatherman” broke Dead Sara on rock radio before it had been officially released, after a programmer from Connecticut’s WCCC heard the band in California and carried the song home. The self-titled debut, Dead Sara, followed in April 2012 on Pocket Kid Records, the label Armstrong and Medley had set up themselves, and Loudwire put “Weatherman” at the top of its list of the year’s best rock songs. That summer meant the Warped Tour, then dates with The Offspring and Muse, and one night at the Sunset Strip Music Festival singing “Soul Kitchen” with Robby Krieger and Ray Manzarek of the Doors.

The next stretch tested the band harder than any audience did. Dead Sara signed to Epic in 2013 and was gone within a year, with its second album stuck in the dispute; Pleasure to Meet You finally came out in 2015 on the band’s own label, paid for through fan pre-orders. Atlantic picked them up in 2017 for the EP Temporary Things Taking Up Space, and Ain’t It Tragic arrived in 2021 to a rock market with shrinking room for a band of their size. Armstrong kept her voice in circulation on other people’s projects: she sang on Demi Lovato’s “Help Me,” opened Lovato’s Holy Fvck Tour with Dead Sara, and recorded or performed with Beck and Awolnation.

Linkin Park’s surviving members met her in 2019, when Mike Shinoda, Dave Farrell, Joe Hahn and Brad Delson were writing together again without telling anyone, two years after the death of Chester Bennington. The sessions, with the drummer Colin Brittain, ran for years unannounced. On September 5, 2024, at a livestreamed show in Los Angeles, the band introduced her as co-lead vocalist alongside Shinoda and released “The Emptiness Machine.” Six days later, at the Kia Forum, Variety’s Chris Willman watched about 17,000 people signal their assent with a roar that matched hers. From Zero followed on November 15 and reached number one in more than ten countries; “The Emptiness Machine” spent eleven weeks at the top in Germany and became the band’s highest-charting single in Britain. Shinoda later said that her vocal in the bridge of “Unshatter,” an early track from the From Zero sessions, was one of the moments that showed the band what was possible together.

The scrutiny that met her had little to do with her range. Within days of the announcement, reports resurfaced her ties to Scientology, including a church press release that had listed her among its prominent members after a 2013 gala, and her attendance in 2020 at a hearing for Danny Masterson, the actor later convicted of rape. Cedric Bixler-Zavala, a former Scientologist whose wife, Chrissie Carnell-Bixler, was one of Masterson’s accusers, criticized her publicly, and Bennington’s son Jaime accused Shinoda of having “quietly erased” his father’s legacy. Armstrong said she had gone to one early hearing as an observer to support someone she then considered a friend, that she soon realized she should not have, and that she had not spoken to him since. About the church itself she had never commented publicly, the BBC reported, though it noted that several Dead Sara lyrics read as a rejection of its teachings. The voice won most of the argument on its own; the silence is the part no performance can settle.

The stage became her counterargument. The From Zero World Tour opened at the Forum and closed in Zurich on June 30, 2026, after 80 shows; Billboard counted 2.2 million tickets and $251 million in gross, the biggest tour of the band’s career. On June 14 the band headlined Download at Donington, the first band with a female singer ever to close the festival. The deluxe From Zero added “Up From the Bottom” and “Unshatter.” At the 68th Grammy Awards in February, From Zero was nominated for best rock album and “The Emptiness Machine” for best rock performance; Turnstile took the album prize.

Unshatter, directed by Hahn, opened in cinemas worldwide on September 30, 2026, five days after the live album Unshatter: Live in São Paulo, recorded at the band’s From Zero release show in Brazil. Armstrong told USA Today that the film holds a lot of vulnerability she finds hard to watch back. Asked whether skeptics would understand her better after seeing it, she said she could “confidently say yes.”

No new dates are on the calendar yet, and Hahn has hinted that a new record has been taking shape in the gaps between shows. If it arrives, it will be the first Linkin Park album written after audiences have spent two years hearing her carry Bennington’s parts, and it will be judged less on whether she belongs than on what the band builds around her voice once there is no comeback left to stage.

Tags: singers, rock, Emily Armstrong, Linkin Park, Dead Sara, From Zero

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