A Thousand Suns - Linkin Park
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Generally favorable reviews - based on 10 Critics What's this?

User Score

Generally favorable reviews- based on 271 Ratings

  • Band members: Mike Shinoda, Chester Bennington
  • Summary: Linkin Park team up again with legendary producer Rick Rubin for its fourth album in attempt to create a genre all of its own.
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 5 out of 10
  2. Negative: 0 out of 10
  1. Linkin Park's fourth album plots a remarkable course. It is, in fact, nothing less than the sound of their hybrid theory soaring to its logical conclusion. [11 Sep 2010, p.50]
  2. On its latest release, A Thousand Suns, the six-piece rock act truly breaks the habit of everything we've heard from it before.
  3. On A Thousand Suns at times the band's odd melange of industrial grind, hip-hop swagger, and teenage-wasteland angst feels jarring--but that should matter little to the kids who clamor for their headphone catharses.
  4. 60
    Linkin Park's fourth studio album (and second collaboration with producer Rick Rubin) contains plenty of aggressively arty material that might surprise fans of the megapopular rap-rock outfit.

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Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 71 out of 100
  2. Negative: 23 out of 100
  1. This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. I gotta say that when i listened to MTM i was not blown away as usual when i listen to a Linkin Park album, i was like, hey where are the old songs and their typical energy, i was kinda disappointed. But when i listened to A Thousand Suns, i was speechless, i know that they're not the same musically and not have that energy they used to have in their first 2 albums, but the change was so in the right direction with outstanding music and great lyrics, i mean the band is growing up and surely their music should be also, as the music they made in the past was GREAT in its own time, but don't expect them making the same kind of music ( nu metal rap core ) for the rest of their career, so i think that MTM was an experimental album for the new direction and A Thousand Suns is their final project which is PERFECT. Musically in my Point of view the album is kind of a mix between U2 and Coldplay and the old Linkin Park with somehow African beats.
    The highlights of the Album are ; Waiting for the end, Robot Boy, When They Come for Me, Iridescent
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  2. The album really proves to be something of a kiss-of-death for a lot of fans and even I held my doubts approaching this album. However, A Thousand Suns also proves how much creativity you can get from a somewhat minimal and fairly abstract approach to song writing and conposition. It's melodramitic and silly at times but the album is an easy listen all the way through with its genre defining sound. Expand
  3. This album could have been much better, but instead it was filled with lots of ambient an random electronic sounds between the real songs. I give a 6 to the album because I still have faith in them. Expand
  4. 3
    The band spoke about this album being much different from their past albums. While there's a change, it's not for the better. Out of the 16 tracks on the album, 6 of them are filler tracks consisting of distorted speeches, piano chords, and what feels like parts of song that were not good enough to be developed into full tracks. Of the rest of the 9 tracks, there are few tracks that successfully stray away from the sound Linkin Park has banked on in their past two albums. Either they fall back into their previous tendencies and create another version of What I've Done/ New Divide (The Catalyst), or they completely fall apart musically (the Messenger). The one standout track on this album is Blackout. This track manages to break through the wall of dull emotions that this album is built on and manages to actually be an enjoyably different sound from Linkin Park. This album is far from perfect, and far from good. After listening to the album, there's nothing even memorable besides Blackout and the feeling of aggravation brought on by this sub-par album. Expand

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