10 Rock Bands With 2 Masterpiece Music Albums
4. Linkin Park
As we neared the beginning of the '00s, the golden age of nu metal had really started to falter a bit. Though there were still bands like Korn that were lighting up the charts, the fallout of Woodstock 1999 was still fresh in people's minds, and the era of angry white boys was about to get a whole lot more insufferable as the years went on. Having an inroad was still possible though, and Linkin Park gave us the best of both worlds right out of the gate.
Out of all the acclaimed nu metal records, there's nothing competing with Hybrid Theory, which has since been certified Diamond for how emotionally vulnerable Chester Bennington's words are compared with Mike Shinoda's frustrated verses, along with the savage guitar chords and Joe Hahn's masterful attention to electronic noise. There's a good chance that nothing could beat a debut that big, but Meteora might have actually been better with the benefit of hindsight.
On this album, the band took everything that made Hybrid Theory great and refined it that much more, from perfecting their ballads on tracks like Numb and Breaking the Habit before stomping you to the ground on tracks like Faint and Nobody's Listening. For all of the nu metal acts coming out around this time, you could tell that they were putting on a performance some of the time. Linkin Park had this kind of angst in their veins, and real always recognizes real.