Linkin Park's A Thousand Suns is the record where the band that sold more than 4.8 million copies of its debut in a single year put the guitars, in Mike Shinoda's words, in "a supporting role". Its second track, "The Radiance", is built on an interview with J. Robert Oppenheimer; the album borrows speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. and Mario Savio, and ends with Chester Bennington singing what he called "literally a letter from me to my children" over an acoustic guitar.
Made over roughly two years at NRG Recording Studios in North Hollywood with Rick Rubin, the album still went straight to No. 1 in America. It also produced the most divided reaction of the band's career. Shinoda later put it bluntly: it got one or five stars from everybody. A decade on, a lot of fans call it their favourite.
A Thousand Suns: Album Facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Linkin Park |
| Album | A Thousand Suns |
| Release Date | 8 September 2010 (several countries); 14 September 2010 (US) |
| Label | Warner Bros. Records |
| Producer(s) | Rick Rubin, Mike Shinoda |
| Studio(s) | NRG Recording Studios, North Hollywood, California |
| Genre / Subgenre | Electronic rock, experimental rock, industrial rock, art rock |
| Track Count | 15 |
| Total Runtime | 47:48 |
| Billboard 200 Peak | 1 (about 241,000 first-week copies) |
| UK Albums Chart Peak | 2 (30 weeks in the Top 100) |
| Other Notable Chart Peaks | Canada 1; Australia 1 (four weeks); Billboard European Top 100 Albums 1 |
| Certifications | US Platinum; Canada Platinum; Germany 3x Gold |
| Estimated Sales | 906,000 in the US by June 2014 (Nielsen SoundScan) |
| Key Singles | The Catalyst; Waiting for the End; Burning in the Skies; Iridescent |
The Band's Story Up to This Point
Formed in Agoura Hills, California, in 1996, Linkin Park arrived fully formed with Hybrid Theory on 24 October 2000. It sold more than 4.8 million copies in its first year and was the best-selling album of 2001. Meteora followed on 25 March 2003, and in 2004 the band worked with Jay-Z on the mash-up record Collision Course.
Chester Bennington later explained the pressure that followed the debut. "When we made Hybrid Theory we made music that we hadn't necessarily heard before," he told Australia's Herald Sun in 2010. When it came to the follow-up, he said, everyone wanted another record like it, "so we did." By the third album the question had changed to whether this was the band they wanted to be for the rest of their lives. "That's when we made the decision, and we grew a pair."
That decision was Minutes to Midnight, released on 15 May 2007 and produced by Rick Rubin. It sold 623,000 copies in its first US week. Bennington remembered the first thing Rubin asked them:
"The very first question Rick asked when he met us was, 'What kind of record do you want to make?' [...] Our response was, 'Well, anything that doesn't sound like what we did before would be a good place to start.'"
Chester Bennington, Spin, 2012
Between albums Shinoda produced "New Divide", released on 18 May 2009 as the main theme of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, while Bennington toured with his side band Dead by Sunrise. He kept writing for Linkin Park on the road.
Pre-production and Demos
Recording began in 2008, more than a year after Minutes to Midnight. By November that year Bennington was already calling the new record a concept album and admitting the idea sounded daunting. He later said the band did not want to wait another five or six years to make one.
In May 2009 Shinoda gave Rolling Stone the band's manifesto, by way of a fast-food analogy. "People just want junk food," he said. "McDonalds is great once in a while, in moderation. Eat it every day and you just turn into a slob. We feel the same way about music." The new album, he promised, "will be the kind of food that's foreign to you, that you haven't had before." He told Billboard the same month that it was not going to be Hybrid Theory and not going to be Minutes to Midnight, and that about half the music was done.
By December 2009 the shape was clearer. Shinoda told Spin that Rubin was producing, that they were about halfway done, and that the band had decided to:
"...focus on just the things that we like, which so far is turning out to mean music that is more beat-driven and has a keyboard and drum machine kind of feel."
Mike Shinoda, Spin, 2009
The volume of material was huge. Asked how many demos they wrote, Shinoda told M Music & Musicians: "Could be 150, but we don't pay a lot of attention to that, because those demos could be anything." Shinoda gave out demo names during a March 2010 LPU fan chat, according to the fan archive Linkinpedia. A demo he called "Dingleberry" became "When They Come for Me", and one called "Meadowlands" is linked to "Waiting for the End". The early demos were heavy and guitar-led, a long way from where the record ended up.
The album had been pencilled in for early 2010, but Shinoda was worried about "the quality of the tunes" and the date slipped.
Creating A Thousand Suns at NRG
Rubin and Shinoda co-produced, as they had on Minutes to Midnight, and the sessions were based at NRG Recording Studios in North Hollywood. Drummer Rob Bourdon described the band as perfectionists who write a lot of material once they get into the studio, and said the challenge was to keep evolving and stay interested, which meant moving away from their familiar sounds.
The method changed as well as the sound. Shinoda described a looser, more "right-brained" process than the band's usual organised approach, and a lot of the lyrics came out of automatic writing:
"It's a technique where you walk up to the mic and start singing as if you already know what the song is."
Mike Shinoda, M Music & Musicians, 2010
The results, he said, are not something you control, "so a lot of weird subconscious stuff pops out of your mouth." The theme that kept surfacing was the fear of self-destruction.
Late in the process, the band stopped thinking about the songs one at a time. "We knew we wanted to make something that felt like a journey, that was more of an album album," Shinoda said. They went back into existing songs, edited them and wrote connecting material, "so this record was more like a movie." Five of the 15 tracks ("The Radiance", "Empty Spaces", "Jornada del Muerto", "Wisdom, Justice, and Love" and "Fallout") run under two minutes, stitched between the full songs. Dave "Phoenix" Farrell told ArtistDirect that "the intention was to create a 45-minute immersive 3-D world with the entire album."
The title came from the Bhagavad Gita. Joe Hahn explained that it refers to the line about the radiance of a thousand suns bursting at once into the sky, which Oppenheimer popularised in 1945 to describe the atomic bomb. The band said Oppenheimer's comments about the bomb shaped the album's apocalyptic mood.
The final record was mixed by Neal Avron and mastered by Vlado Meller. The sessions were documented in The Meeting of A Thousand Suns, a roughly 30-minute making-of film about the band's time at NRG with Rubin. It was first issued on DVD on 8 September 2010 and uploaded to YouTube for the album's tenth anniversary.
Personnel and Credits
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Core band | ||
| Vocals | Chester Bennington | Also lyrics, percussion, rhythm guitar |
| Vocals, keyboards, guitars | Mike Shinoda | Also sampler, piano, synthesiser, vocoder; producer, engineer |
| Lead guitar | Brad Delson | Also sampler, keyboards, percussion, acoustic guitar, megaphone |
| Bass | Dave "Phoenix" Farrell | Also backing vocals, keyboards |
| Turntables, samples | Joe Hahn | Also programming; creative director |
| Drums | Rob Bourdon | Also percussion |
| Additional musician | ||
| Programming | Czeslaw "NoBraiN" Sakowski | Outro of "When They Come for Me" |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Producers | Rick Rubin, Mike Shinoda | Same team as Minutes to Midnight |
| Engineers | Ethan Mates, Josh Newell | Pro Tools |
| Mixing | Neal Avron | Assisted by Nicolas Fournier |
| Mastering | Vlado Meller | Assisted by Mark Santangelo |
| Production coordination | Lindsay Chase, Ryan DeMarti | |
| Drum technician | Jerry Johnson | |
| Artwork | ||
| Art direction, design | Frank Maddocks | Also creative director |
| Artwork | Josh Vanover | Also creative director |
| Creative director | Ellen Wakayama | |
The one outsider in the band credits got there by winning a competition. In July 2010 Linkin Park ran "Linkin Park, Featuring You" with MySpace, handing fans the stems of "The Catalyst" to remix. The winner, Czeslaw "NoBraiN" Sakowski from Swidnica in Poland, saw his remix added to the Best Buy edition of the album, and he picked up a programming credit on the outro of "When They Come for Me".
The instrument list says plenty about the record. Shinoda's credits run to sampler, piano, synthesiser and vocoder; Brad Delson, the band's lead guitarist, is also credited on sampler, keyboards and megaphone.
The Songs on A Thousand Suns
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Requiem | Linkin Park | 2:01 | Shares its lyric with The Catalyst | |
| 2 | The Radiance | Linkin Park | 0:57 | Built on an Oppenheimer interview | |
| 3 | Burning in the Skies | Linkin Park | 4:13 | Yes | International-only single, March 2011 |
| 4 | Empty Spaces | Linkin Park | 0:18 | ||
| 5 | When They Come for Me | Linkin Park | 4:53 | Demo title "Dingleberry"; nods to Jay-Z's The Blueprint 2 | |
| 6 | Robot Boy | Linkin Park | 4:29 | Bennington and Shinoda sing together | |
| 7 | Jornada del Muerto | Linkin Park | 1:34 | Shares its name with the Trinity test valley | |
| 8 | Waiting for the End | Linkin Park | 3:51 | Yes | Shinoda's favourite Linkin Park song |
| 9 | Blackout | Linkin Park | 4:39 | Promo | Choruses are entirely screamed |
| 10 | Wretches and Kings | Linkin Park | 4:10 | Promo | Mario Savio speech; homage to Public Enemy |
| 11 | Wisdom, Justice, and Love | Linkin Park, Martin Luther King Jr. | 1:39 | King's "Beyond Vietnam" speech | |
| 12 | Iridescent | Linkin Park | 4:56 | Yes | All six members sing together |
| 13 | Fallout | Linkin Park | 1:23 | ||
| 14 | The Catalyst | Linkin Park | 5:39 | Yes | Lead single |
| 15 | The Messenger | Linkin Park | 3:01 | Bennington's letter to his children |
Shinoda refused the concept-album label even as everybody applied it. "If those albums are more of an Andy Warhol, this is more of a Jackson Pollock," he told MTV News, calling it a "multi-concept record" with no narrative. Elsewhere he likened it to an inkblot test.
The Catalyst
The lead single was picked to send a message. "We wanted a track that represented where the album was going to be and how it was going to work," Farrell told MTV News. "It's a risk, but [it's] worth it." At 5:39 it is the longest song on the record, and Billboard's Jason Lipshutz called it a "nearly six-minute anthem of aggression". Its opening lyric also turns up in "The Requiem", so the album starts by previewing a song that arrives 13 tracks later. Shinoda said the idea behind Joe Hahn's video was to imagine the moment nuclear fission was invented.
When They Come for Me and Wretches and Kings
These are the album's hip-hop core, both with Shinoda rapping. MTV News's James Montgomery described them as "snarling, raw, dark and ... strangely organic." "Wretches and Kings" is built around Mario Savio's "Operation of the Machine" speech, and the band said it pays homage to Public Enemy; Kerrang!'s Ian Winwood heard a reference to "Fight the Power". "When They Come for Me" points at Jay-Z's The Blueprint 2.
Blackout
For anyone missing the old Bennington, "Blackout" is the answer. He sings most of it and raps the verses, and the choruses consist entirely of screaming, with Shinoda joining him near the end. EA Sports used it in FIFA 11.
Waiting for the End
Shinoda opens with the verses before Bennington takes the chorus, and an MTV reviewer described one section as a "Ragga dancehall toast". In a 2020 Twitch stream Shinoda named it his favourite Linkin Park song.
Iridescent
Shinoda sings the verses, Bennington the chorus, and on the third chorus all six members sing together. It became the theme of Transformers: Dark of the Moon after Michael Bay approached the band, and composer Steve Jablonsky worked with Hans Zimmer and the band to weave it into the score.
The Messenger
The closer is the album's most exposed moment: Bennington's voice and an acoustic guitar played by Brad Delson. "That song actually came to me almost entirely all at once," Bennington said. He recorded the first idea on his phone and wanted the finished version to keep that feel. "We didn't double the vocals, and we didn't try to go for the perfect performance," he said. "I just sang it with my heart."
B-sides and Bonus Tracks
The single formats leaned on live recordings and remixes rather than unreleased songs:
- "The Catalyst" CD single: a live version of "New Divide".
- "Waiting for the End": a Glitch Mob remix, plus "Guitarmagedon", Does It Offend You, Yeah?'s remix of "The Catalyst".
- "Burning in the Skies": live versions of "Blackout" and, on the iTunes EP, "When They Come for Me".
- Album bonus tracks: "New Divide" and "Blackbirds" on several editions, and NoBraiN's remix of "The Catalyst" on the Best Buy, Napster and HMV editions.
A demo of "The Messenger" with choir backing vocals appears on the Meeting of A Thousand Suns DVD.
Album Artwork
The front cover carries no band photo and no title lettering. It is a single blurred black shape, soft-edged like smoke or airbrushed ink, with streaks fanning out to the left and a pale wedge cutting through it, all against a plain white field. Frank Maddocks handled art direction and design, with artwork by Josh Vanover and creative direction shared with Ellen Wakayama.
Release and Reception
The album came out on 8 September 2010 in several countries, 10 September in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and 14 September in the US, where the band previewed new songs live in New York on release day. It debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with about 241,000 copies, just edging out Trey Songz's Passion, Pain & Pleasure. That was well down on Minutes to Midnight's 623,000. In week two it slipped to No. 3. In the UK it opened at No. 2 with 46,711 copies, behind The Script's Science & Faith. It went to No. 1 in Canada and spent four weeks at No. 1 in Australia.
Critics split hard. Metacritic averaged 66 from ten reviews, but the individual scores ranged from 5/5 at Artistdirect, where Rick Florino wrote that "after A Thousand Suns, all rock 'n' roll will revolve around Linkin Park", to 1/5 from Jim Farber at the New York Daily News, who heard "sonic non sequiturs". Kerrang! gave it 4/5, Rolling Stone 3/5 and Spin 6/10. Stephen Thomas Erlewine at AllMusic felt the subdued rhythms "wind up monochromatic". Christopher Weingarten in the Village Voice called it "2010's best avant-rock nuclear-anxiety concept record", while MTV's James Montgomery compared it to Radiohead's Kid A. In Classic Rock, Emma Johnston found it "every bit as self-important and po-faced as you'd imagine" and concluded: "Musically, though, it's all over the place."
Bennington had seen it coming:
"It felt very natural to go in a direction that was challenging for us as well as challenging for our fans 'cos we love taking people on this little trip that we're on."
Chester Bennington, Herald Sun, 2010
Awards followed. The band won Best International Rock/Alternative Group at Germany's ECHO Awards in 2011, and the album picked up two Billboard Music Award nominations. Kerrang! ranked it 19th in its albums of 2010. The RIAA certified it gold on 11 January 2011 and platinum in 2017.
Singles and Music Videos
| Single | Released | US Hot 100 | Other peaks |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Catalyst | 2 August 2010 | 27 | US Alternative 1; UK Rock & Metal 1; Germany 11 |
| Waiting for the End | 1 October 2010 | 42 | US Alternative 1; UK Rock & Metal 3; Germany 29 |
| Burning in the Skies | 21 March 2011 | Austria 35; Germany 42; UK Rock & Metal 16 | |
| Iridescent | May 2011 | 81 | Australia 39 |
Joe Hahn directed all four videos. "The Catalyst" first surfaced in a trailer for EA's Medal of Honor on 1 August 2010, the day before the single, and the full video premiered online on MTV.com and VH1.com on 25 August. The single sold 60,000 downloads in its first US week. The "Waiting for the End" video, shot in September 2010 and premiered on MTV on 8 October, has the band performing in darkness under heavy digital effects. The single eventually went platinum in the US.
"Burning in the Skies", an international-only release, got a video shot from 17 to 19 January 2011 and premiered on kerrang.com. It plays entirely in slow motion, following ordinary people in their final moments before a blast hits downtown Los Angeles, timed to land on the guitar solo. For "Iridescent", premiered on 3 June 2011, Hahn drew on H.G. Wells's short story "The Country of the Blind": mostly black and white, with Shinoda as a one-eyed king and the band recreating Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper. A 3D version played in some cinemas after the credits of Dark of the Moon.
Touring and Live
"The Catalyst" was played live for the first time on 12 September 2010 at the MTV Video Music Awards, from the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, a location kept secret until the performance. The A Thousand Suns World Tour then ran from 7 October 2010 in Buenos Aires to 25 September 2011 in Singapore.
On 7 November 2010 the band played "Waiting for the End" at the MTV Europe Music Awards in Madrid, beamed in from an outdoor stage at the city's Puerta de Alcalá. They won Best Live Act. The North American leg opened on 20 January 2011 at the BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise, Florida, and ran 21 dates to Denver's Pepsi Center on 26 February:
- Pendulum and Does It Offend You, Yeah? supported up to 11 February.
- The Prodigy took over from 15 February in Houston.
- The 23-song opening night set began with "The Requiem" and closed with "Bleed It Out".
- "Waiting for the End" went out on Saturday Night Live on 5 February 2011.
In June 2011 the band performed "Iridescent" at the Moscow premiere of Transformers: Dark of the Moon, in Red Square.
In TV, Film, Games and Media
- Medal of Honor (2010): "The Catalyst" in the trailer and end credits.
- FIFA 11: "Blackout", which won Best Song in a Video Game at MTV's video game awards.
- Mobile Suit Gundam: Extreme Vs.: "The Catalyst" as theme; a Japanese limited edition came with a Gundam model kit.
- Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011): "Iridescent" as theme.
- CSI, season 11: "Waiting for the End", 14 October 2010.
- Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, Rock Band 3, DJ Hero 2: tracks from the album.
Covers and Samples
The album is built on borrowed voices: Oppenheimer on "The Radiance", Mario Savio on "Wretches and Kings" and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence" on "Wisdom, Justice, and Love", which earns King a writing credit. Going the other way, Pendulum, who would open for the band in America, covered "The Catalyst" for BBC Radio 1's Live Lounge on 22 September 2010.
Reissues and Live Releases
- A Thousand Suns + (28 March 2011, Europe): adds a live DVD of the Madrid show of 7 November 2010.
- A Thousand Suns: Live Around the World (19 June 2012): live compilation released on Spotify.
- The Meeting of A Thousand Suns: the DVD documentary, put on YouTube for the tenth anniversary.
The Legacy of A Thousand Suns
Linkin Park pulled back on the next record. Ahead of Living Things in 2012, Bennington told NME it would be "more familiar to people than 'A Thousand Suns' was", the album where they had decided to "just go bonkers". Over the previous two records, he said, they had been "trying hard to break out of the nu-metal box that we'd found ourselves in."
Time has been kind. In 2021 Kerrang! called it a "daring concept album" and ranked it third in the band's catalogue, behind only Meteora and Hybrid Theory. The same year, Shinoda looked back on the reviews:
"It got one or five stars by everybody, so we ended up with three-star ratings all over the board because half the people hated it with all of their heart and soul."
Mike Shinoda, speaking to Anthony Fantano, 2021
Ask fans who know the band reasonably well for their favourite Linkin Park record now, he said, and "a lot of them say that one." After Bennington's death on 20 July 2017, the clip of "The Catalyst" at the Griffith Observatory was shown at that year's VMAs in his honour.
Things You Might Not Know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| A chart first | "The Catalyst" was the first song in the 14-month history of Billboard's Rock Songs chart to debut at No. 1. |
| The single outsold the album | By June 2014 "Waiting for the End" had passed 1,058,000 US copies, while the album stood at 906,000. |
| The interlude's name | "Jornada del Muerto" shares its name with the New Mexico valley where the Trinity test exploded the first nuclear device on 16 July 1945. |
| Longest album to date | At 47:48 across 15 tracks, it is the longest Linkin Park studio album up to that point. |
| A remix-contest winner | NoBraiN's winning entry came out of a contest that ran for just over two weeks, 9 to 25 July 2010. |
| A second video | "Waiting for the End" got a second, live video, filmed at Chicago's United Center and St. Paul's Xcel Energy Center in January 2011. |
The Riffology podcast digs into the records that changed the bands that made them, and few changed Linkin Park more than this one. Find it on all the major podcast platforms.
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