10 Most Divisive Albums In Rock Music History
2. A Thousand Suns - Linkin Park
In the wake of Radiohead's Kid A blowing minds in the rock industry, there were millions of rock bands looking to expand beyond the sounds of pop punk and nu metal at the time. That's when you started to see people bring either a little bit more of hip hop element into their sound or you'd have people like the Strokes throwing it back to the glory days of rock and roll in the '70s. If you wanted to look for a successor to something like Kid A, Linkin Park actually managed to make their answer record on A Thousand Suns.
When this thing came out though, there were a lot of Linkin Park fans that felt outright betrayed by a record like this. Expecting something more along the lines of Crawling or Breaking the Habit, the glitchy production of this album was enough to turn off a lot of the hardened metalheads. It's a shame too, considering they missed out on some of the best material that the band would ever write.
Structured as the fallout of a nuclear attack, a lot of these songs function as a way for people to thrive in this post apocalyptic world, especially when songs like Waiting for the End and Wretches and Kings build to their own climactic peaks. It might need a bit more time to grow, but a few years down the line we might be talking about this record the same way we're talking about an album like Hybrid Theory today.