Last month, Mike Shinoda gifted fans with two new songs —"Prove You Wrong" and "What The Words Meant" — and on Monday (March 4), the Linkin Park emcee shared the music video for "I.O.U."
The track comes from Shinoda's debut solo album Post Traumatic, which came out last year. The visuals show him performing the song live to audiences around the country.
"[It's] a really grimy, dark hip-hop track, it’s all braggadocio and it comes from the type of hip hop that I listened to growing up," Shinoda explained to Forbes about the song. "I took it to Jason Joshua to mix, he mixes a lot of modern hip hop and pop, but a ton of really great dark hip-hop records and we were talking about the track and he goes, 'Who did the track on this?' I’m like, 'What, what do you mean?' This is the first time we worked together so he didn’t know I make all the music."
Watch the "I.O.U." video below.
Shinoda releasedPost Traumaticlast June, almost a year after the death of his close friend and bandmateChester Bennington, and admitted that its conception was like therapy for him.
"It's basically chronologically created in a certain way, so in terms of the events of the last nine months, it started in a really dark place, and then slowly as things in my life got brighter, the music did too. That's something you notice from beginning to end on it," he told iHeartRadio at the time.
Photo: Chady Awad