LINKIN PARK turned up on "America's Got Talent" last night to play "The Emptiness Machine" with Nene Royal, the sixteen-year-old who had just won the thing.
Royal — full name Rattikarn Amloy — took the show's 21st season and its $1 million prize, beating out nine other finalists including magic acts, dog acts and a robot dance crew, and becoming the first Thai winner in the programme's history. "I'm very happy and emotional right now," she said after the result.
She got there on covers, and the choices say something about a sixteen-year-old's record collection. Her first "America's Got Talent" performance was THE CRANBERRIES' "Zombie". The live quarter-finals brought MUSE's "Hysteria" and SOUNDGARDEN's "Black Hole Sun", which earned Mel B's Golden Buzzer and a direct place in the final. For Tuesday's final in California she sang THE WHITE STRIPES' "Seven Nation Army".
The LINKIN PARK collaboration is the kind of thing that normally gets announced and quietly falls apart. Royal had previously named her dream list of future collaborators as SYSTEM OF A DOWN, LIMP BIZKIT, LINKIN PARK and THE WARNING — one of the four showed up inside a week of her winning. Ahead of the performance her social accounts posted photographs of her and her family with members of the band, captioned: "Dreams can come true if our hearts fight."
"The Emptiness Machine" is the song LINKIN PARK returned with in 2024 — the first with Emily Armstrong, and the one that had to carry the weight of the band existing again at all. Handing it to a teenager on network television, two years on, is a reasonable measure of how far that has settled.
The win registered at state level back home. Thai prime minister Anutin Charnvirakul congratulated Royal and thanked her for showing Thai talent to a global audience and promoting a positive image of the country through music.
"Nene's success is proof that young Thais have the potential to compete with anyone in the world when they are given the opportunity, stay determined and continue to develop their talent," he said in a statement.