The videos for Somewhere I Belong, Breaking the Habit, and Numb occupied MTV and top positions of the charts. Meteora, Linkin Park's second album, was produced in 2003 to lead the Billboard chart as the most distributed record. In addition, Linkin Park recorded Reanimation, a collection of remixes. Overall, they gave 320 concerts for that year and released DVD Frat Party at the Pankake Festival. In 2001, Linkin Park toured the USA having many performances together with famous rappers, and also participated in Ozzfest. By today, more than 10 million copies of this record have been sold. This album has remained the most successful one in the band's discography. The record included such chart-toppers as Crawling, One Step Closer, and In the End the video for the latter, broadcasted by MTV, was proclaimed the video of the year. This album was a good seller with 4 million and 800,000 copies sold for the first year and earned then Grammy as the best rock album of the year. In a year, they released their debut album Hybrid Theory, featuring the material accumulated for many years. In 1999, Linkin Park managed to get a contract with Warner Bros.
Thus, they called themselves Linkin Park. The young men went into troubles with the other band under the same name charging them with a copyright infringement.
As he had agreed to join the band, it was called Hybrid Theory. His unique voice made a deep impression on the other members. It took the group a while to find a new vocalist. After multiple refusals of labels to cooperate, the original singer Mark Wakefield made up his mind to seek his fortune in another band. In spite of the limited finances, the band started recording several songs in Shinoda's bedroom, their first studio. The group was founded in 1996 by classmates Mike Shinoda and Brad Delson. Meteora came out in 2003, followed by a run of albums (2007’s Minutes to Midnight, 2010’s A Thousand Suns, 2012’s Living Things, and others) that shifted more heavily toward electronic music.Linkin Park is a rock band from Los Angeles playing alternative rock. Hybrid Theory was a kind of Rubicon in hard rock, making the influence of hip-hop and electronic music impossible to ignore. And by the time they went “pop” (2017’s One More Light), they’d been redefining the terms of commercial rock music for nearly two decades.įormed on the outskirts of Los Angeles in 1996, the group spent their first few years struggling-at one point, an executive suggested they fire Shinoda, their MC, and take a more conventional rock-band route.
When they wanted to take the guitars down a little, they moved toward a brooding, post-hardcore vision of electronic music that let Bennington flex his inner Depeche Mode fan while retaining a sense of anguish that, it turns out, didn't need aggression to find expression. Heavy as it could be, the music was almost never macho, trading in hard-rock pomp for the arty vulnerability of emo and synth-pop. But part of the reason the band survived was that they were always more versatile than their moment. Hybrid Theory was a once-in-a-generation album, arguably the commercial and creative pinnacle of rap-rock. On a deeper level, the choice set a kind of metaphorical course for catharsis: Linkin Park were angry, but their anger burned clean. It was more that in avoiding blunt, four-letter expressions of frustration, Shinoda and Bennington could challenge themselves to lean into-and lay bare-their pain in ways that cussing only covered up. It wasn’t just about keeping their audience, a portion of which might’ve had trouble slipping Parental Advisory stickers past their parents. When Mike Shinoda and the late Chester Bennington were writing lyrics for Linkin Park’s 2000 breakthrough, Hybrid Theory, they made a pact: No cussing.