LINKIN PARK singer Chester Bennington walked the MAP Benefit Red Carpet with his new STONE TEMPLE PILOTS bandmates, and paying no mind to current legal wranglings (against former singer, SCOTT WEILAND), they said that Chester's membership is not temporary and that there will be tons of new material coming out soon.

Check out an Artisan News report below:

STP bassist Robert DeLeo, guitarist Dean DeLeo, and drummer and Eric Kretz issued the following statement via their official website on Friday:

"You may have read we recently filed suit against our former singer, SCOTT WEILAND. We wanted to clarify a few things:

Our purpose in taking this action is not to hurt Scott. We want to move forward productively, and Scott’s choices and actions have prevented us from doing that. We were in the process of putting our 20th anniversary tour together to celebrate the release of our first album, Core. The plan was for a big tour where we’d perform the album in its entirety, along with some other favorite STP songs. So, you might imagine our shock and disappointment when, without any notice, we learned that Scott had seized this tour for himself as his solo tour, and decided to do exactly what we as a group had planned. We found out about it the same way you did - we saw an ad for it.

Without getting into legal details, the band has a binding agreement that clearly states what each of us can and cannot do outside of STP. Unfortunately many of the decisions Scott made violate this agreement, have been harmful to the band, and prevented us from moving forward. When our requests to Scott and his representatives that they abide by the agreement were ignored, we finally had enough. So now, we’ve made our choice. It was beyond time we made some new music, which was impossible in the dysfunctional environment we were in. We’ve lived in it long enough and have decided to move forward with STP. We wish Scott well. We’re really excited about the new music we’ve been making with Chester, including the song we just released, 'Out of Time'.

We love this band and respect everything it means to you. We want to always give you our best and the choice we made is completely in that spirit."