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"Friendly Fire" was a song that was written for One More Light by Mike, Brad, and Jon Green. The title was first seen on a song board in a picture Joe Hahn posted on September 6, 2016 alongside songs that made the album. [1]

Jon Green is the singer of the English band The Bonfires. Both bands were at the Larrabee Studios in November 2015 and Jon proceeded to work with Linkin Park throughout 2016. While two songs with Jon made One More Light, "Nobody Can Save Me" and "Battle Symphony", Linkin Park worked with Jon on at least two more songs - "Friendly Fire", released in 2024, and "Tidal Wave", which is unreleased. Mike Shinoda went on to say Jon Green related really well with Chester.[2]

When the album was released in May 2017, Jon wrote on Instagram, "Still assuming they meant to hit up the other Jon Green, who by the way is total quality. Total honour to have a couple of tunes on this record & to have got in the room with such a genuine & brilliant bunch of guys. Congrats @linkinpark all their team and all involved."[3]

In a December 2016 issue of the Kerrang! magazine, Mike Shinoda announced Linkin Park had collaborated with Canadian musician Corin Roddick from Purity Ring,[4] but when questioned about the collaboration, Roddick said it "does not exist".[5] However, he is credited for additional production and additional programming on "Friendly Fire".

Following the release of One More Light, Mike said he would try to get demos and studio content that didn't make the album out to fans because there is some cool stuff.[6] Brad Delson added, "There's definitely a few gems that we've got in our back pocket. But I would say the vast majority of those songs fortunately will never see the light of day. They were just a part of the journey; the ones that were the most satisfying and exciting were the ones we ultimately focused on and finished and make up the album."[7]

In a stream on June 17, 2020, Mike confirmed "Friendly Fire" was completely finished and had vocals from Chester on it. "There was a song, a One More Light song, that we mixed. We mixed more than the finished album and we mixed a couple other songs just to see if one of them would make the cut or if we would use it for a b-side. And it was Friendly Fire. A Jon Green co-write. I wrote that with Jon, I think it was me, Jon, and Brad mostly. I still love that song." He went on to say that the song wouldn't be coming out soon, but would likely be released. This was the first public mention of Jon collaborating on the track.[8]

When asked a few days later about more unreleased One More Light songs, Mike said, "Every album we've got so many songs that we make and you know, they're not... some of them are just in really like, half cooked, half baked conditions. So I mean, I think fans tend to be very overly optimistic about those types of things. In their imagination, there's some gem that's the best Linkin Park song that's sitting on a hard drive somewhere. I promise you that's not the case. The best stuff is always the stuff we put on the record. There are some songs where we were like, "oh this is really good", but it's not better than the record. Some of it is like, a verse and chorus copied twice and that's the second verse as well... it's like half done, it's not done."[9]

"Friendly Fire" was finally released in 2024 as part of the greatest hits album Papercuts - Singles Collection 2000-2023. Upon release, Brad Delson said:

“‘Friendly Fire’ was always one of our favorite songs from the One More Light sessions. Something about it wasn’t quite right so as close as it got to the finish line, we chose to set it aside for later. When we started looking for an unreleased track to include on our greatest hits collection, I was blown away by the power of the song, the power of the storytelling, the power of the vocal, the sonic landscape and I actually thought that it was closer than maybe we had realized at the time.

We got together to work on it and connect some of the missing pieces that for whatever reason hadn’t revealed themselves during the recording of One More Light. I can’t wait for people to hear it. It’s such a beautiful, compelling, heartbreaking, hopeful story and it really resonates with me today.