Chester Bennington

Chester Charles Bennington (*20th March, 1976, Phoenix, Arizona) started his musical career really early. His first band was called "Grey Daze", but he left the band in 1998. After struggling to find a new band to sing in, Bennington thought about quitting his musical carrier altogether.

That's when Jeff Blue (vice president of A&R at Zomba Music) offered him a audition with a band called "Xero", in Los Angeles.
Chester quited his job and moved to LA where he successfully made his audition and find his new band, they're called "Hybrid Theory" at this point.
They struggled to get a record deal but finally made it with Warner Brothers.
After some legally issues the band had to find another name and "Linkin Park" was born.


Now Linkin Park is one of the biggest rock bands in the world and Chester made it big as a singer as well. After Mike Shinoda started his side project "Fort Minor" in 2005 is it now Chester's turn to come out with "Dead by sunrise".

Dead by Sunrise

"Dead by Sunrise" is the side project of Chester Bennington from Linkin Park, Amir Derakh and Ryan
Shuck and their band Julien-K.
Their first record -titled "Out of Ashes"- is going to be released in September 2009.

The album is said to be more different than the sound Bennington is doing with Linkin Park and it'll have a lot influences from '90s and '80s rock, pop like The Cure, Depeche Mode or Bauhaus.
Chester said in an interview about the difference between "Dead by Sunrise" and Linkin Park:

"It’s hard to describe. Like, describe the difference between Soundgarden and Alice in Chains, you know what I mean? It’s almost impossible. There are obvious things about it that when you listen to it, you’ll know it’s not a Linkin Park record. You’re not gonna get confused. You’ll have to hear it."

He also said about "Dead by Sunrise" and how he came up with the name:

"I came up with the name after experiencing many days where I thought I was not going to live to the next day. I was definitely going through a very rough time in my life during certain phases of making this record. One [phase] was in the beginning process of making this record, being divorced. My band was on hiatus and fighting with the record company ... in 2005, 2006 ... and around that period I was drinking whiskey like ... it was ridiculous. I literally was not leaving my house, I locked myself in my closet, suffered from delirium tremors, on a daily basis; I thought I was really going to die. I was gray and sickly looking, on the verge of turning yellow, and my liver was swollen. It was horrible. And then I got remarried and figured out that that was not the way to live. And at the same time while going through all of that, I was also experiencing new, beautiful things ¡X a great, healthy relationship in a loving environment, rediscovering my band mates through sobriety, and finding out who I really am through all of that, too. So there's a very dark element to the record, a very personal element to the record, and there's a very bright shiny element to it as well."

Julien-K

Julien-K was formed in 2003 by Amir Derkah and Ryan Shuck, formally known as members of Orgy. Later on Brendon Belsky and Elias Andra completed the band.

Their first album "Death to analog" was released on March 10, 2009. 2007 they played on the Main Stage at the Project Revolution tour together with Bands like Placebo, My Chemical Romance and Taking Back Sunday. They also performed as opening act for Evanescence on their North American Tour.

In 2009 they teamed up with Chester Bennington and his solo project, the band's called "Dead by Sunrise". Their album will be released in fall of 2009.


"Both bands are the same. The one where Chester sings and writes is "Dead by Sunrise", but when I sing, and Amir and I are the primary writers, it becomes Julien-K and it's more electro and much darker... Julien-K and "Dead by sunrise" are basically a creative collective, we're sort of Warhol-style factory in that sense", explains Ryan Shuck. " 'Dead by sunrise' is Chester's Julien-K if that makes any sense."