Linkin Park Band • Page 124

I'd put Living Things over Minutes To Midnight as well, despite the weaknesses of the former. Never been a huge fan of the latter.

 

Living Things and The Hunting Party both feel like a lot of wasted potential. They were really gung ho on putting an album out every 18 months-2 years in the early-mid 2010s, and I think it led to both of those albums feeling rushed. Living Things especially I think suffers from a less than ideal mix that muddies a lot of the guitars and synths together. Lost In The Echo live vs the album is night and day IMO

Also Reanimation is a top 3 album from LP. Criminally overlooked

 

Living Things has been easily my least favorite of theirs since it came out. Idk, it just feels like the most lukewarm, “mid” version of the band, in spite of potentially interesting moments.

Minutes to Midnight rules, and so does Hunting Party tbh. Like half of their discography could be my favorite depending on my mood, lol. I just think this band is neat.

 

No idea how I’d rank them, but Hunting Party is my least favorite. It’s got some incredible tracks but I’ve always found it really uneven

 

A Thousand Suns
Reanimation
Minutes to Midnight
One More Light
Living Things
Hybrid Theory
The Hunting Party
Meteora

OML through THP may as well be tied though

 

Hybrid Theory
Meteora
A Thousand Suns

Honestly any of these 3 can be my number 1 on a given day, but HT and Meteora were so big for me in high school that the nostalgia puts it slightly above ATS.

Reanimation
Minutes to Midnight
Living Things
Hunting Party
One More LIght

 

One More Light is probably my least favorite, just because I think it strayed a little too much from their core sound unnecessarily.

I get that their style is supposed to encompass anything and everything, but some songs on that album feel like they're crying out for a guitar riff.

 

One More Light is probably their most uneven (between it and that Living Things dud), but I like going to bat for it because its highs are pretty high. “Heavy” and “One More Light” in particular are in their highest tiers of songs imo.

Both it and Hunting Party are I think more interesting than they get credit for. The former is treated as a retreat of sorts to heaviness, and the former as a craven push for radio play. But, to me, they’re both albums with clear identities that are trying to isolate elements of their sound and push what they can do with that one element as the unifying sound. And, both have successes that feel very compelling for the post-Thousand Suns version of the band.

Speaking of Hunting Party, I’m revisiting it this morning, and yeah. As familiar as some beats are to prior songs of theirs, it still really works a Heavy Linkin Park Album for me. The lows are safe but work in context, and the highs absolutely rule.

(And, in the year of The Artist in the Ambulance Revisited, I’m once again reminded how much “Guilty All the Same” feels like it could be a b-side from that album, lol, but with just enough classic LP weaved in to be interesting & fun.)

 

honestly the only reason i give OML any time of day is because Heavy and the title track, despite being somewhat generic, stayed on repeat upon release as i was navigating my own journey with depression, anxiety, and OCD. and this was pre-Chester passing.

 

If The Hunting Party were just Guilty All The Same and then that final run of Rebellion through ALITS, it'd probably be LP's best album. I just don't really like the rest of the songs that round out that album all that much

 

This is a wild take to me. Keys To The Kingdom and All For Nothing are absolute jams.

 

Those both have parts that I REALLY like (the solos on both are two of the best solos on the album and Mike's second verse on AFN is one of his best post-ATS verses), but the songs as a whole just don't come together for me. I've always looked at Keys the same way I look at Until It Breaks in that it's a cool experiment with song structure and mashing up completely different vibes, but I still usually just find myself skipping to the bridge

 

I had never listened to the OML title track until Chester passed but when I did... oof. So good.

 

Haven’t listened to any of their albums after Minutes but I love that album. Even back when it came out I really appreciated them not making Meteora/HT 2.

 

A Thousand Suns is honestly my favorite album by them. Just such a great work as a whole.

Minutes To Midnight walked so A Thousand Suns could run.

 

Hm. I don’t really see those two albums as similar enough to directly link them in that way.

 

Your ranking is the same as mine, including the alternating top three. The only change i'd make is swapping Reanimation and Minutes to Midnight.

 

Minutes To Midnight was not just the start of Linkin Park breaking out of the box they made on Hybrid Theory and Meteora, but also the start of Mike branching out from his "expected" role.

So then we get A Thousand Suns, a concept album with an even more wildly varying sound and some very great duets between Chester and Mike. Iridescent is a highlight of that album.

That's what I mean.

 

Yeah I fully agree with this. A Thousand Suns was imo the full realization of them breaking out of their “expected” sonic lane as a band.

 

Yeah, I see what you mean by that.

But to me, Minutes to Midnight’s identity is more so “their arena rock album” (to [over]simplify it), while A Thousand Suns is “their deconstruction album.” So, since they don’t serve the same purpose, I personally wouldn’t consider the one warming up for the other.

If anything, I kinda see Living Things operating in a similar space to Thousand Suns. (But, significantly less successfully, lol, which is why I view it as a dud.) In the same way that those first two feel like companion albums to each other.

 

Mmm, I actually feel like Living Things is more a companion to Hybrid Theory and Meteora, in that I feel like it takes the lessons from Minutes and Suns and applies it to the kind of album that the first two were. It even has the whole "instrumental leading into the final track" thing going on.

 

M2M and APTS don’t sound like each other but after how surprising M2M was when it came out, I can definitely understand it prepping people for the equally, if not moreso, unexpected nature of ATS.

Living Things, or specifically leading with LITE, definitely felt like a response to rope meteora/HT fans back in. I have no idea how ATS did commercially but that’s the impression I got at the time - fwiw, I loathe most of that album lol

 

The structure of Living Things definitely feels like a return, but the sound feels most akin to Thousand Suns. If I’m being kind about the album, I see it as the “reconstruction” to Thousand Suns’ “deconstruction.”

If I’m being less kind, it’s their safest album. Which, isn’t always the worst thing, but in this case, in this band’s discography, makes it the most vanilla. It has no identity to me besides “hey, another Linkin Park album.” (The next closest “safe” album to my mind has always been Meteora, though that whole recent anniversary recontextualized in a way to change my perception of it.)

 

That's basically what they were trying to do with LT, yeah. They said they specifically would avoid songs on MTM and ATS that reminded them of what Linkin Park "should" sound like, but for LT they were more open to those influences again cause they felt like they had proved that LP was more than nu-metal with ATS. I don't think they were explicitly trying to write songs in that vein, but I do agree with you that I've always associated LT more with HT than MTM or ATS.

I will always wonder how LT would've turned out if they hadn't scrapped the folk direction the album started with, though. Could've been very interesting