10 Perfect Albums That Will Make You Love Metal

Ever since it debuted back in the late '90s, the entire appeal of nu metal tends to be very hit and miss for most rock listeners. While bands like Limp Bizkit and Coal Chamber may have sold tons of records in their day, there's also a strong contingency of fans that are looking at that scene as just a phase before they actually discovered the real problems that they had in their lives. There were some good ideas in the scene though, and Linkin Park took all of the genre's goodwill and brought it to the top of the charts.

Even when the nu metal movement seemed to be dying out, hearing Hybrid Theory was a breath of fresh air for the entire scene, being one of the first times that you heard both a singer and a rapper trading off between verses. Once you started to break down what these songs were actually about, they hit a lot harder than you probably remember, like the need to be left alone on A Place for My Head to the subtle anxiety that follows you around everywhere you go on Papercut.

Without so much as a parental advisory sticker, this is the kind of album that shot up the charts and got fairweather fans of music into the genre, with kids jamming to these songs right alongside people like Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. Sure, a song like Crawling might not have aged the greatest or anything, but this the kind of product of its time that became a benchmark for what nu metal could be.