"Linkin Park's" fourth album, "A Thousand Suns", was released on September 14, 2010.
A project that started out as a concept album, found itself down the road as one of the band's most eclectic and experimental albums.
A little over eight months after the release of the band's third album "Minutes to Midnight" which came out in 2007 and was a fundamental change in the band's style, the members of "Linkin Park" gathered to work on their next album.
Reinforced by producer Rick Rubin, armed with lots of ideas and creativity, in an unstoppable free state of mind the band members decided they wanted to do something different once again. They wanted to create freely, without limitations, and without clinging to one style or another. They agreed that if some song would not seem right to them, they would just throw it away and move on, without trying to work on it, change it or improve it.
The one who took things into his own hands in addition to Rubin was Mike Shinoda. He bravely decided to create a concept album, an album that has one narrative leading from start to finish. The initial idea was to use the narrative of nuclear war as a concept—the cause of such war, the implications, and the effects on the future of humanity.
A burst of creativity from all the band members brought many varied materials to the table. The first songs really stuck to the narrative but over time the members felt that exactly the opposite of what they intended was happening. The narrative forced them to change, improve and rewrite material when the initial intention was to create freely. Several months into the recordings they found themselves fighting to keep the narrative and change things just to fit the main theme. At one point Mike and Chester Bennington decided that they had enough and in a joint decision with the rest of the band members that this is OK to go out of the concept theme and write freely.
This album has a lot of everything, but unlike the previous album, there is no polishing here, no varnish, and no smooth continuance. It was as if the band tried to force the connection between the songs and used link sections which are primarily recordings of prominent people in American history, to do so.
We really like this album, although you will not likely find here a decent guitar riff or a snare sound, or even a bass line. The electronics here are very dominant but are made with industrial roughness that is sometimes reminiscent of "Nine Inch Nails". There is something about this album that takes you on a crazy journey between protests, passion, love, compassion, and armageddon that threatens to destroy our world.
The singles "The Catalyst", "Waiting for the End", "Burning The Skies" and "Iridescent" came out of the album and of course flew straight to number one on the Billboard 200.
Feel free to grab a glass of beer or whiskey, put on your headphones, and go on an amazing journey: Spotify, Apple Music
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