Read this: Every song on Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory, ranked from worst to best
Recently speaking to Kerrang! about One Step Closer, guitarist Brad Delson recalled the single being “the first time we heard ourselves on the radio”.
“We were on our first tour bus driving through Arizona and we heard it on the station that Chester grew up listening to,” he said. “We got home a week later and we heard it on a local station, KROQ, and that was super-wild. When I was little I would listen to the radio in my room and call in to request songs, but to actually have my song on radio was surreal.”
On the other hand, turntablist Joe Hahn revealed that One Step Closer was actually his least-favourite Linkin Park song for quite a while…
“I kept hearing it over and over and over again,” he explained. “Very early on it defined everything about the band. A lot of people heard that song on the radio and that was their idea of what the band was, whereas the album itself has so much colour to it. But to a lot of people it was all about that opening guitar riff and someone shouting, ‘Shut up when I’m talking to you!’ over and over again. It was such a big song that we had to play it every day (laughs), so for a while I wouldn’t say I hated the song, but I’d roll my eyes at the baggage. We grew out of that and I don’t feel that way today.”