5 Incredible Pop-Rock Albums That You Shouldn’t Have Missed In The 2010s

By Matthew Murray /

2. Linkin Park €“ A Thousand Suns

I€™ll admit that this is a slightly dodgy choice. Does Linkin Park constitute pop-rock music these days? I hope not. But some of the pop influence on this album is clear. And I said in the intro I would use pop and rock examples€so you can€™t really complain.

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The choice is made a little more questionable by the fact that album sales were relatively high for this particular entry. But my issue here is not with how many brought the album€but with how many gave it a chance. A Thousand Suns is easily my favourite Linkin Park album. It€™s a brilliant piece of evidence that when a good band experiments with their sound it has the potential to make them incredible. Linkin Park had an awesome niche sound going with their first three nu-metal albums. But A Thousand Suns changes everything. We get rap, hip-hop, rock, techno, reggae, classic rock and pop influences running throughout.

Yet a large portion of the existing fan-base rejected it. And it didn€™t do a lot to bring new followers on board. I remember a friend of mine saying he thought it €œwas a bit crap; there's reggae on it.€ I could have screamed. The first single, a techno tinged battle chant called The Catalyst charted well; but reggae and epic pop-rock track Waiting For The End didn€™t achieve a great deal of success. Even the inclusion of Iridescent on the soundtrack of Transformers 3 couldn€™t help push the album into public consciousness.

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