10 Rock Music Albums No One Understood At First

When the nu metal empire started to crash pretty hard, Linkin Park made the best move they could possibly make by going alternative. Although some of the sounds of Minutes to Midnight may have been a bit hit and miss for those who were looking for the heaviness behind songs like Place for My Head or Don't Stay, they needed to shed some of their old skin if they were going to survive for the long haul. When they decided to get more ambitious though, you could see the clear line when metalheads started to jump off the bandwagon.

For all of the risky moves that Linkin Park have made, A Thousand Suns got a pretty decent thrashing by their peers, who thought that the band was going in a more electronic direction and had left rock and roll behind altogether just to make movie soundtrack fodder. While there are some bits and pieces of that sound in this record, their attempt to write a concept record centered around nuclear fallout is actually a lot better than people give it credit for, putting you in the center of the mayhem and making you feel lost in a sea of smoke trying to make sense of everything.

If you had asked the band about what they were trying to do, even they were talking about moving outward from this record, taking inspiration from bands like Radiohead and inadvertently creating a sound that would be copied for decades to come. A Thousand Suns is certainly still a polarizing record, but chances are the more seasoned veterans of pop rock like Twenty One Pilots saw this album as a blueprint when cutting their first tracks.