10 Rock Albums That Were Ahead Of Their Time

Never has a genre crashed as hard and went out of style quicker than that of nu metal. Just as much as hair metal may have been considered passe at the turn of the '90s once grunge hit, hearing angry white boys complain about their inner torment was the last thing most fans wanted to hear around the late '00s. You couldn't just regurgitate the same thing anymore, and Linkin Park decided to treat us to a dystopian headtrip on A Thousand Suns.

While this album might have some of the best Linkin Park songs of all time, it was not treated nearly as well by the metalheads at the time, not liking their shift to alternative and electronica and swearing them off as either sell outs or giving up on them entirely. And it's not like they don't have a point, with a lot of the guitars being fairly muted and the electronic haze being a lot more prevalent this time around. It might be overwhelming, but that was the point here.

In trying to write about the fallout of nuclear Armageddon, the claustrophobic sounds of these songs just enhance the kind of defeated quality of the record, almost having the same kind of poignancy that you would get out of a Radiohead record. Even though some of the cooler kids were talking about the garage rock revival around this time, a lot of the newer rock acts that would come in the 2010's would end up sounding a lot more like Linkin Park than the Strokes. It's up for debate as to whether that's a good or bad thing, but you can definitely see the seeds of what this album brought to the table.