10 Perfect Albums That Have Awful Production

During the fallout of nu metal in the early '00s, Linkin Park did the smart thing and tried to get as far away from their genre as they possibly could. The days of Meteora may have helped them achieve legendary status, but sticking to your guns in the era when bands like Hollywood Undead were surfacing was going to be a whole different story. it was time to evolve, and A Thousand Suns threw us down into a digital apocalypse when we first listened to it.

Right off the bat though, this album is by no means bad from a raw production standpoint. The sound of Rick Rubin and Mike Shinoda working together on these tracks is a match made in heaven, creating a sound that feels like a heavier version of what Radiohead were doing around the time of Kid A. What really bogs this record down was the production decisions, from the random noise glitches that pop up on a song like Blackout to having interludes that tend to waste time in between some of the lengthier cuts on the project.

While these interludes might have been meant to add a little bit of color to tell the story of the record, something like Empty Spaces feels more like filler than anything, amounting to just a few seconds of crickets before segueing into the next song. A Thousand Suns may be an album that's trying to set up different images in your mind, but you're more likely to be looking at your watch wondering when the song's over than actually soaking in these interludes.