5 Incredible Pop-Rock Albums That You Shouldn’t Have Missed In The 2010s

2. Linkin Park €“ A Thousand Suns

A Thousand Suns

I€™ll admit that this is a slightly dodgy choice. Does Linkin Park constitute pop-rock music these days? I hope not. But some of the pop influence on this album is clear. And I said in the intro I would use pop and rock examples€so you can€™t really complain.

The choice is made a little more questionable by the fact that album sales were relatively high for this particular entry. But my issue here is not with how many brought the album€but with how many gave it a chance. A Thousand Suns is easily my favourite Linkin Park album. It€™s a brilliant piece of evidence that when a good band experiments with their sound it has the potential to make them incredible. Linkin Park had an awesome niche sound going with their first three nu-metal albums. But A Thousand Suns changes everything. We get rap, hip-hop, rock, techno, reggae, classic rock and pop influences running throughout.

Yet a large portion of the existing fan-base rejected it. And it didn€™t do a lot to bring new followers on board. I remember a friend of mine saying he thought it €œwas a bit crap; there's reggae on it.€ I could have screamed. The first single, a techno tinged battle chant called The Catalyst charted well; but reggae and epic pop-rock track Waiting For The End didn€™t achieve a great deal of success. Even the inclusion of Iridescent on the soundtrack of Transformers 3 couldn€™t help push the album into public consciousness.

 
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Matthew Murray is an 19 year old film student in New Zealand. He is addicted to music, movies, gaming and television and spends his time feeding the obsession! When he is not writing about these things, he is lining up for these things, talking to people about these things and sitting around dreaming about these things.