A Thousand Suns

A Thousand Suns is the fourth studio album by American rock band Linkin Park. It was released on September 13, 2010. The album was written by the band and co-produced by Linkin Park vocalist Mike Shinoda and Rick Rubin, who previously worked together to produce Minutes to Midnight (2007). The album's lead single, "The Catalyst", was serviced to radio and released to digital music stores on August 2, 2010. The band is currently promoting the album through the A Thousand Suns World Tour.

A Thousand Suns is a concept album dealing with human fears such as nuclear warfare. "On this record, the concepts blend human ideas with technology [...] Human fears, your fear of what's going to happen in the world, the music kind of references that", said Mike Shinoda on an interview with MTV.^[1] The album's title comes from the Hindu Sanskrit scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one," a quote made famous by J. Robert Oppenheimer in reference to the atomic bomb.^[2]

Although commercially successful, the album received mixed reviews upon release. The album as a whole has been compared to a progressive rock album, and compared to Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon and Radiohead's Kid A.^[3]

Writing and recording

Recording for the album began in 2008, shortly after the release of Minutes to Midnight.^[4] In November 2008 Chester Bennington stated this "sound[ed] a little daunting to me, so, I think my confidence level will drop, but when it was presented to us by this friend of ours, we liked the idea. It was an inspiring idea, and it was something we could relate a lot of the things we like to write about to."^[4] In May 2009, a story was published in a Billboard magazine where Shinoda revealed information about the album. "I feel like we've been writing a lot. I'd say we've got about half the music done, though I shouldn't say halfway because who knows how long the next batch of songs will take. But all the material's just kind of coming together, and every week we meet up and assess the situation and for the rest of the week we just go and work on whatever we find exciting."^[5] He also explained the experimentation the band would be working with. "It's not going to be Hybrid Theory. It's not going to be Minutes to Midnight. And if we do it right, it'll have a cutting edge sound that defines itself as an individual record separate from anything else that's out there."^[5]

Drummer Rob Bourdon referred to himself and the band as "perfectionists" when asked about the new project. "We tend to be perfectionists and its sort of how we work, We like being in the studio and when we get in there we write a ton of material."^[6] Bourdon admitted that the album was challenging to complete. "We've been making music for a long time so one of the challenges was to evolve and make something to keep us interested and also have a lot of fun in the process. We've been used to making a certain type of music and using sounds to accomplish that. So to break out of that and push ourselves to grow is definitely challenging."^[6]

Style and composition

In an interview with Rolling Stone in May 2009, Shinoda revealed that the band was in the process of writing and recording material for the album.^[7] The album was originally slated for an early 2010 release, but Shinoda was very concerned about "the quality of the tunes" stating that "if we need to take a step back and make sure everything is top, top quality by our standards, we will."^[7] Shinoda also stated that, comparing to Minutes to Midnight, the new album would have a larger "thread of consistency" and would be more experimental and "hopefully more cutting-edge".^[8]

The album's style has been compared to the music of Pink Floyd^[3] and contains the high-pitched sonar "ping" from Pink Floyd's "Echoes" at the end of "Robot Boy" and continuing into "Jornada del Muerto".

It has also been stated that the album honours the hip-hop group Public Enemy. On the song "Wretches and Kings", Shinoda stated "There is a homage to Chuck D on there. It's probably the most hip-hop song on the record and one of the most aggressive... Public Enemy were very three-dimensional with their records because although they seemed political, there was a whole lot of other stuff going on in there too. It made me think how three-dimensional I wanted our record to be without imitating them of course, and show where we were at creatively."^[9] The first line of the first and second verse ("To save face, how low can you go?" and "So keep face, how slow can you go?") are references to one of Public Enemy's most famous songs "Bring The Noise", which open its first verse with "Bass! How low can you go?" in a melodically similar way. The album also features speech samples by American political figures,^[10] including Martin Luther King, Jr., J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Mario Savio.

"When it came to doing things that felt very much like older Linkin Park, like mixing hip-hop with a rock chorus, [we] felt like, if we were going to do it, we need to really do it in a way that felt natural and felt original and felt like it was something we hadn't done in the past," said Chester Bennington in an interview with MTV News^[11] who referred to Linkin Park's new style as less technical and more organic: "[While] there are hip-hop songs on the album - 'Wretches and Kings', 'When They Come for Me' — they're like nothing the band have tried before: snarling, raw, dark and [...] strangely organic."^[11]

A Thousand Suns Media

Linkin Park performing in Berlin, Germany to promote A Thousand Suns on October 20, 2010
"The Catalyst", the album's first single, was first performed live at the Griffith Observatory (pictured).
"Waiting for the End", the album's second single, was performed at the Puerta de Alcalá Gate (pictured).
The radio edit of "Iridescent", the album's fourth single, was performed live at Red Square (pictured) in Moscow.