Minutes to Midnight by Linkin Park

Minutes to Midnight, Linkin Park's third album, came out on Warner Bros. in May 2007, and it's the sound of a band deliberately walking away from the nu metal that made them famous. Rick Rubin produced it with Mike Shinoda, the first time the band worked without Don Gilmore, and the title comes from the Doomsday Clock.

It was a long road. They started work in 2003, broke off to tour Meteora, and then side projects took over, with Shinoda launching Fort Minor and Chester Bennington starting Dead by Sunrise, so the album sat on the shelf for a while. When they came back with Rubin, they threw out the old direction and started over. The result is broader and moodier: Bennington's voice can still tear the paint off the walls, but here it's just as likely to ache. Brad Delson's guitars, David Farrell's bass, Rob Bourdon's drums and Joe Hahn's samples and turntables leave room for rock ballads, soaring anthems and plenty of slow burn. "What I've Done" is the lead single and the mission statement, "Bleed It Out" is a stomping, shouting party, "Shadow of the Day" drifts in a haze of gloom, and "Given Up" is all rage. It was also their first full album to carry a Parental Advisory label.

It debuted at number one in the US and 15 other countries. In America its 623,000 first-week sales were the biggest of 2007 at that point, and it has gone five times platinum. Critics were split, though Rolling Stone still named it one of the best albums of 2007.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.