After several delays, Linkin Park’s highly anticipated follow-up to 2007s Minutes to Midnight is set to hit stores mid-September. Titled A Thousand Suns, the new album — with its minimalist album art and music that’s more conceptual and experimental in nature than any of the band’s previous efforts — has some longtime fans seeing red.
If “The Catalyst” is any indication of what’s to come, A Thousand Suns will demand a lot from fans. Recently making its radio debut, the single is raising eyebrows for its techno/industrial vibe that’s more Nine Inch Nails than Linkin Park. Although the song landed at the #1 spot on Billboard’s Rock Songs chart, it isn’t sitting well with many hardcore fans who claim the band have strayed too far from their rapcore roots this time and are dismissing the album outright before giving it a fair shake.
From the start of the writing process of A Thousand Suns nearly two years ago, Linkin Park — Mike Shinoda (vocals/rhythm guitar/keyboards); Chester Bennington (vocals); Rob Bourdon (drums); Brad Delson (lead guitar); Dave “Phoenix” Farrell (bass); and Joe Hahn (turntable/sampler/synthesizer) — were intent on further evolving their sound and continuing the experimentation that began with the multi-platinum selling Minutes to Midnight. That album, which was co-produced by Shinoda and the iconic Rick Rubin (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica, Slipknot), marked the band's move from the nu metal angst of their earlier works to music that was more melodic and guitar-driven. The album's title, which is a reference to the Doomsday Clock, foreshadowed its pensive mood and political themes. Minutes to Midnight was also the first Linkin Park album to include profanity.
The band have once again teamed up with Rubin who has inspired them to find yet a totally new voice for A Thousand Suns. "On the last record, Rick's challenge was getting us to open up our perception of what our music could be," Bennington told Rolling Stone. This time out Linkin Park challenged themselves to do something “genre-busting.” Something with more of an edge. Something that would completely redefine the band. “On Hybrid Theory (2000) we wanted to introduce ourselves to the world with a certain sound,” says Shinoda. “Then on Meteora (2003) we were trying to show that we weren't a fluke and we could do the sound that made us successful a second time. By the time we got to Minutes to Midnight, we wanted to break down that sound and go outside its confines. Now that we've done that, we feel like we can do anything.”
It’s precisely that “anything” that some fans are finding hard to swallow. The industrial/techno sound of “The Catalyst” is quite a stretch for them, and with A Thousand Suns being touted as the band’s most eclectic album yet, those who want more of the same from Linkin Park are s**t out of luck. “We hope we no longer sound like the same band we were (when we started) because that is exactly what we didn’t want to occur during our career,” says Bennington, who refuses to let the band stagnate or be pigeonholed. When Linkin Park stop maturing as artists, they will stop performing as them as well.
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Linkin Park recently announced a European tour that kicks off on Wednesday, October 20th at the O2 World, Berlin and wraps Wednesday, November 11th at the 02 Arena, London. The tour’s setlist will feature a plethora of the band's biggest hits and will showcase material from A Thousand Suns, which drops on September 13 and 14, 2010, in the UK and US, respectively.
Be sure to catch "The Catalyst" video when it premieres on August 25th at midnight on both MTV.com and VH1.com. For further information and for a list of upcoming tour dates, visit the band’s website at www.linkinpark.com.
In other Linkin Park news, look for Chester Bennington in the seventh and final installment of the Saw Franchise, Saw 3D, which has a release date of October 22nd in the US.
