Image Credit: radnomadvisuals on Instagram Tonight, Linkin Park makes their way to São Paulo, Brazil to play the third-last show for this South America leg of the 2025 From Zero shows, which will be the last tour leg until 2026. The venue tonight is Estádio MorumBIS, a stadium venue with a capacity of 62,000, and this isn't the first time Linkin Park has taken the stage there. The band will, of course, be supported tonight by the celebrated Poppy, who has been delivering the pain with her opening sets. Linkin Park's history of shows in São Paulo, and Brazil as a whole, naturally starts off big: on September 11, 2004, the band headlined the Chimera Music Festival and playing for a crowd of over 80,000 people. The festival, only in its inaugural year, took place across two Saturdays, September 11 and September 18, at what was then known as Estádio do Morumbi, the same venue Linkin Park will perform at tonight. The band was at the top of the bill for the first Saturday, supported by the Brazilian rock act Charlie Brown Jr. At the time, this was by far the biggest audience of the band's career. This standalone Brazil show served as Linkin Park's final live performance of 2004 and the end of the entire Meteora album cycle, capping off a massive year of almost nothing but relentless touring. As the band was still a few years out from embracing varied rotating setlists for each tour leg, the setlist for Chimera was basically identical to what they delivered for other 2004 festival sets including Germany's Rock Am Ring. The show began with an extended intro preceding "Don't Stay" which had been debuted during the European festival run in mid-2004 and was used throughout the entire back half of the year. The intro used excerpts from "Gacela of the Dark Death", a reading of Federico García Lorca's poem of the same name (posthumously published in 1940) by the New York-based folk artist Joan Baez, recorded and released in 1968. The rest of the setlist largely consisted of songs from the the band's first two albums, but many of the songs had changes in their arrangements with extended intros or outros. A few songs from Hybrid Theory in particular were outfitted with elements from their counterparts 2002's Reanimation. Some highlights include guitar-driven extended intros for "Somewhere I Belong" and "Numb", a heavy transitional segment between "Figure.09" and "From the Inside", and an extended intro and bridge for the closing song "One Step Closer", drawn from Reanimation. There were some non-album inclusions too, with the "Step Up / Nobody's Listening / It's Goin' Down" medley and a cover of the Nine Inch Nails song "Wish". Eight years and three touring cycles later, on October 7, 2012, Linkin Park returned to São Paulo and performed at Arena Anhembi, an outdoor venue with a capacity of 40,000. This was the second date of a South American / South African portion of the LIVING THINGS world tour, which was the band's last tour leg of 2012. At this show, Linkin Park was once again supported by Charlie Brown Jr., after being together on the Chimera bill in 2004. This show was filmed and broadcast live from start to finish by the cable channel Multishow. Linkin Park had a few setlists up their sleeve for this tour leg. The São Paulo date saw them starting off with "TINFOIL" and "Faint", and following up with "Papercut", "Given Up" and "With You". The setlist naturally also included cuts from LIVING THINGS like "In My Remains", "VICTIMIZED" (arranged to included parts of "QWERTY"), "LIES GREED MISERY" and lead single "BURN IT DOWN". Other highlights here from the 2012 shows include some arrangement changes such as "Numb" being introduced with a piano part from an extended outro previously heard during the Minutes to Midnight tour cycle, and "Waiting for the End" being performed with an extended intro (with a rap verse from LIVING THINGS deep cut "UNTIL IT BREAKS") and a big extended ending. The band also performed the "Leave Out All the Rest / Shadow of the Day / Iridescent" ballad medley, and included parts from Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" in their lengthy live arrangement of "Bleed It Out". There were pleas from the crowd for the A Thousand Suns deep cut "Robot Boy" to be performed, but Linkin Park sadly did not oblige. Five years later, on May 13, 2017, the band performed a headlining set at Maximus Festival in São Paulo. This show was the last stop on a brief South American tour, right ahead of the May 19 release of their seventh studio album One More Light. Maximus Festival took place on two dates in two cities; there was firstly an event in Buenos Aires, Argentina on May 6, 2017, followed by the São Paulo edition at Autódromo José Carlos Pace, a 60,000-capacity motorsport circuit. Linkin Park headlined on both dates, which bookended this four-date South America run. Other acts on the bill for this date included rock heavyweights Slayer and Rob Zombie. Audio from Linkin Park's set was broadcast live by the São Paulo radio station 89 FM A Radio Rock. These tour dates were Linkin Park's first outright headline shows for 2017; in terms of live performances, the first half of their year was taken up by promotional appearances for television, radio, label events and the like. The first Maximus set in Buenos Aires, being the first show of the entire One More Light world tour, naturally saw the band delivering a whole new setlist, including live debuts for several One More Light songs. Linkin Park performed essentially the exact same setlist later in São Paulo, again starting with the intro combining elements from "Fallout" and "ROADS UNTRAVELED" to lead into "The Catalyst" (following this show, "Talking to Myself" became the typical opening song for the 2017 shows) and "Wastelands", the only song from 2014's The Hunting Party that would appear in the One More Light tour setlists. Other highlights from these 2017 festival sets include a new extended arrangement of "CASTLE OF GLASS", incorporating sections from Mike Shinoda's nu-disco-influenced remix from 2013's RECHARGED plus Shinoda throwing in a rap verse from "A Place for My Head" (this verse is really the only difference between the two Maximus Festival sets), the piano-based version of "Crawling", a guitar-heavy intro for "Leave Out All the Rest" and an extended bridge for "What I've Done" featuring an expanded guitar solo. "In the End" was once again performed with the surprise pause after the intro, but Rob Bourdon played a bar by mistake instead of stopping with the rest of the band. Aside from the aforementioned audio livestream, this Maximus Festival show (unlike the the first date in Argentina) was not recorded or broadcast by any Brazilian media entities. Linkin Park:br, a Brazil-based fansite, edited together some audience video footage of the "One Step Closer" performance over audio from the radio broadcast: Following a lengthy hiatus, which began in 2017 due to Chester Bennington's untimely passing, Linkin Park eventually made a big return in September 2024 with the announcement of a new album, From Zero, with a November 15 release date, and a series of live shows leading up to it. At the end of this 2024 itinerary were two back-to-back dates, November 15 and 16, at Allianz Parque, a 55,000-capacity stadium venue in São Paulo. The first of these two shows served as the From Zero album release show, and Linkin Park performed not only to the sold-out crowd at the venue; like the 2012 São Paulo show, this set was livestreamed by Multishow, providing fans around the world with the first proshot recording of an entire show from the From Zero cycle. The setlist for this show was relatively standard for 2024, but the band did use the occasion to give the From Zero cut "Two Faced" its live debut. Some of the songs which appeared in this set, and which were performed routinely throughout 2024, would not return in 2025. "Breaking the Habit" and "LOST IN THE ECHO", as well as the new arrangements of "Leave Out All the Rest" and "My December", are all among the songs which have not been played by the band since these 2024 São Paulo shows. For the November 16 show, Linkin Park switched the setlist up slightly, since the shows were back-to-back. Among other things, "Points of Authority" was brought back into the set as the third song, and "Two Faced" was performed once again as the fourth, with "Lying From You" being taken out. "Friendly Fire" also made a return to the setlist, having not been played the previous night (along with "Breaking the Habit", "Leave Out All the Rest" and such, this is another song which was hasn't been played since). Lastly, "A Place for My Head" made for another big highlight, appearing as the penultimate song in the encore segment. At the end of November, Linkin Park released a video of "Two Faced" on its own from the November 15 show on YouTube. Audio of the performance was included on the physical copies of the From Zero deluxe edition, alongside other live tracks from 2024. We are now coming up upon a year since that significant moment in Linkin Park history - the first From Zero shows for Brazil and the release of the album at the same time - and the band is now about to rock São Paulo once again. Adding to that, 20 years on from their first visit to Brazil, Linkin Park is headlining at the Estádio MorumBIS again for what is surely a full-circle moment. Even without these milestones to celebrate, Linkin Park's South America shows have always been a sight to behold. We are coming to the end of this tour leg now, and the band have kept in top form, not to mention the passionate crowds which places like Brazil have always been renowned for. Linkin Park's most recent show, at Estádio Couto Pereira in Curitiba, Brazil on November 5, saw "Crawling" pop back up as the second song after "Somewhere I Belong" - at the previous show, in Chile on November 2, it was played slightly later. "Cut the Bridge", which was performed in Buenos Aires, Argentina on October 31, re-appeared in Curitiba after not being performed in Chile. Another highlight is "Given Up" making a return in place of "IGYEIH", after not appearing in either of the previous two shows. "From the Inside", "Over Each Other" and "Stained" were among the songs which re-appeared after the Chile show but at different points in the set: the first two were both part of Act II in Chile, but appeared respectively in Act III and Act IV in Curitiba. The encore segment comprised "Papercut", "Heavy Is the Crown" and "Bleed It Out" once again (the latter including a rap verse from "A Place for My Head"). And, yes, Poppy did join Linkin Park on-stage for "One Step Closer" once again: After tonight's São Paulo show, Linkin Park closes out their massive South American run with one more Brazil show in Brasília on November 11, followed by the final tour date for 2025: Mexico City on November 16. There are already many From Zero tour dates set up for 2026, and we're still getting more now - just recently, it was revealed that Linkin Park will headline Download Festival in June - so there is certainly no shortage of things to look forward to in the Linkin Park world right now. If you're attending tonight's show, or otherwise keeping up with these recent shows like we are, we'd love to hear from you!
I would just like to understand how the brains of these Brazil fans are wired. They go so hard. It's crazy.
SETLIST: - ACT 1 (Inception Intro C) - 01: Somewhere I Belong 02: Lying From You 03: Up From the Bottom 04: New Divide - Short Moscow intro 05: The Emptiness Machine - ACT 2 (Creation Intro C) - 06: The Catalyst - Shortened (no third chorus; no breakdown) 07: BURN IT DOWN 08. Cut the Bridge 09: Where'd You Go - Shortened (intro, first verse, and first chorus only) 10: Waiting for the End - 2024 intro 11. LIES GREED MISERY 12. Two Faced 13: Joe Solo - With Colin 14: Mike Solo Medley - "When They Come for Me", "It's Goin Down" verse 1, & "Remember the Name" mashup; with Colin 15. IGYEIH 16: One Step Closer - With Poppy; 2024 intro & outro - ACT 3 (Collapse Transition) - 17: Lost - Hybrid version 18: Good Things Go 19: What I've Done - ACT 4 (Kintsugi Transition) - 20: Overflow 21: Numb - "Numb / Encore" intro 22: Over Each Other 23: In the End 24: Faint - Extended outro - ACT 5 - Encore (Resolution Intro C) - 25: Papercut - Extended intro 26: Heavy is the Crown 27: Bleed It Out - Extended bridge with "A Place for My Head" verse 1; extended outro