LINKIN PARK Studio Album Ranking

The Music Room
#1

So with The Hunting Party coming out in less then a month and today is the listening session, I thought I’d rank my favorite albums from them in order with justified reasons, and I’d like to get everyone’s opinion as well, so here we go

1.LIVING THINGS
2.Meteora
3.Hybrid Theory
4.A Thousand Suns
5.Minutes to Midnight

I really enjoyed LIVING THINGS because I think it represents what makes LINKIN PARK. It’s like a combination of all their previous styles over the years and there’s not one song I don’t like

Meteora and Hybrid Theory are kind of tied. They’re both classic and a great entry for this band. They’re like brother albums, only reason Meteora is better to me is they perfected the nu-metal style but they are both amazing

I loved A Thousand Suns as a whole, I like the concept through out and the song writing was excellent, and the electronia style. It could of been 2nd but out of the 15 tracks 9 were actually songs and the others were introludes. I really liked the songs on there I just wanted more of it

And Finally Minutes to Midnight is split for me. Half of it was went hard and had some really awesome tracks, the other half was good, just not as memorable. Don’t get me wrong I like songs like valentines day and in pieces but are over shadowed by Leave Out All The Rest and No More Sorrow and some of the other singles

Regardless I love LP obviously and all of their discography and the LPU demos are interesting, I just thought I’d share, LINKIN PARK is a very talented and diverse band, they make great songs just some are better than others

I’ll redo this when The Hunting Party comes out, and if anyone who went to the listening session would like to share about the new album, please do, thanks for reading all of this

#2
  1. A Thousand Suns -epicccccccc. This album is a journey that takes me places.
  2. Meteora - Perfect mesh between rock, rap and electronic bits with a harsh honesty to it. They set out to improve on their original forumla and “do it again”, and they did.
  3. Hybrid Theory - the one and only legend.
  4. Living Things - This eventually grew on me.
  5. Reanimation - This is not just a “remix” album. There is some real craft that went into this. “Remix album” is almost an insult to Reanimation.
  6. Minutes to Midnight - too raw for my taste. Gimme meduim well instead. Still has some interesting songs on it.

But this statement makes me sad. Have we really forgotten what an album is? CDs invented track breaks to make skipping around the album easier. They don’t define songs, they are convienience markers.

Try this: Ignore the track breaks and listen for the beginning and end of each song instead. Notice how the songs are longer than the track breaks make them look. The purpose of the tracks on ATS in this case is to seperate out the radio eligible segments from the album. This necessitates that the some sections be cut out into interlude tracks.

This means that Linkin Park was bringing back the concept of a full album, instead of a collection of songs. But it has been so many years since real albums were a thing that LP still has to conform to the collection-of-songs idea and have them seperated out. The interludes were a compromise, but they are still part of the album meant to be listened to as a whole. That’s why when ATS was released, LP actually put out a 50 minute song that was ATS: The Full Experience. Because one 50 minute song was how it was originally supposed to be experienced. Stop counting “songs” and listen to the music. Quality over quantity.

#3

I know were you’re coming from man, that’s why I said I like it as a whole, I like to listen to A Thousand Suns from beginning to end and how it fits together in one big experience. From your point of view I would definitely have it at the top, but my taste is to have a collection of awesome songs that I can listen to individually and get lost in the moment of that one song, that’s just me, but it’s hard, it’s like picking favorites with your children

#4

Here let me put it this way, I thought A Thousand Suns was epic, I was so hyped for it cause before it was announced, that was when I really got into LINKIN PARK. A Thousand Suns was great, just something was missing, I can’t figure out what, but I wasn’t completely satisfied, and I wanted more