10 Perfect Albums That Defined The 2000s

As dumb as this sounds, there was actually a lot of doubt surrounding Linkin Park's follow up to Hybrid Theory back in the day. Though they had already showed us just how talented they were as musicians on the album before, this is when nu metal was starting to get too saturated, and these guys could have easily fallen into obscurity along with it. The minute that you heard Chester Bennington screaming "I WON'T BE IGNORED" on Faint though, you knew we were going to be in for a ride.

While it's easy to look at Meteora as a direct descendent of their first album, this is everything that made Hybrid Theory so good, only fleshed out a lot more. From the heavier riffs to the greater approach to songwriting, this feels like the band has grown up a lot from writing a song like Crawling, with tracks like Easier to Run and Numb dissecting what it means to feel truly alone in the world.

Granted, it does feel a little different hearing Chester sing these songs about depression and isolation after his untimely suicide. That's not how this album is supposed to be perceived though. Chester never wrote these songs as a way to encourage people to go down this path. This is the kind of music that was meant to acknowledge the hard times in life but to also have hope for what's going to happening later down the line.