P
erhaps the members of Linkin
Park were simply being true to
form when they told K! they
didn’t want to say too much
about their fourth album for
fear of giving too much away
about its direction. This was, after all, a band
still slow to warm to being interviewed,
hesitant to explain the thoughts, feelings
and meanings of their work because they
believed they’d ultimately all be available
to the listener via the words and music of
whatever album they were working on.
This time around, however, this reluctance
seemed to stem less from frostiness and
more from a desire to blindside listeners with
something so different it would make the leap
between Meteora and Minutes To Midnight
look like a mere pigeon step – an idea given
credence as the band discussed their hopes
for the album.
“We want to go to a psychedelic place
where you can feel and see the sounds,”
enthused Chester. “We want to be in a multi-
sensual place, musically. We want to combine
it all into a story that feels as though we’re
taking you on a journey.”
In 2008, Linkin Park had released a
standalone single called New Divide. A year
earlier, What I’ve Done had been included on
the soundtrack for Michael Bay’s Transformers.
New Divide, however, was specifically penned
for its sequel, Transformers: Revenge Of The
Fallen, and based around the themes exploredin the blockbuster film. While similar to the
band’s past work, given its verse-chorus-
verse structure, the heavy use of synths and
adherence to a concept hinted at intriguing
possibilities.
It became clear these possibilities had
been explored to a degree no-one could have
predicted when their fourth album emerged.
A Thousand Suns didn’t simply display Linkin
Park’s unprecedented musical evolution, but
also their intellectual growth. It was the sound
of a band switching their mad-at-the-world-
isms for an album mad at what was being
done to the world. It dealt less with robots in
disguise and more with “[putting] your bodies
upon the gears,” a phrase from a legendary
address by activist Mario Savio that was
sampled on the track Wretches And Kings. The
instrumental Wisdom, Justice, And Love would
sample another prominent activist, Martin
Luther King Jr.
The title A Thousand Suns was inspired by
Hindu Sanskrit scripture. J. Robert Oppenheimer,
a theoretical physicist and the ‘father of the
atomic bomb’ had used its words to describe
the blinding blast unleashed by the U.S. army’s
first successful test, codenamed ‘Trinity’, of the
weapon on July 16, 1945. Oppenheimer would
be directly sampled on the track The Radiance,
while The Catalyst, the album’s first single and
an early indicator of the confused reactions to
come, would see Chester and Mike incorporate
Oppenheimer’s words by asking ‘Will we burn
inside the fires of a thousand suns?’.36 KERRANG!
LINKIN PARK continue to stretch boundaries by thinking
big on their “multi-concept” epic that – even nearly
a decade later – continues to divide and bewilder...
A THOUSAND
SUNS
2010
Photo: LISA JOHNSON