12 Greatest Duos In Hard Rock

In retrospect, people tend to look at nu-metal as a mixed bag. There were certainly great bands like Korn coming to the forefront, but the mix of hip hop and rock always felt like you had to sacrifice one singing style to blend in with your contemporaries. Coming out of California at the end of the millennium, Linkin Park flipped the nu-metal genre on its head with two vocalists for the price of one.

Together as a creative team, Mike Shinoda and Chester Bennington were one of the more original pairs of the nu-metal movement, trading off vocal duties from one song to the next. From the start of a song like "Papercut," Shinoda is a masterful lyricist as he works his flow into the metal setting flawlessly. Even though Bennington may never spit a rap verse, his harsh singing on all of the band's tracks give the songs much more heart than they would have had with just Shinoda at the front.

The band's namesake genre may have had an expiration date, but they were able to distance themselves from their roots on Minutes to Midnight and A Thousand Suns, with Shinoda even flexing his singing chops along with his rapping. Linkin Park might not have been the heaviest band of the nu-metal genre, but the pairing of Shinoda and Bennington was one of the more interesting dynamics in the entire metal scene.