“Numb” by Linkin Park

"Numb" closes Meteora, Linkin Park's second album, from 2003, and it was the third single the band pulled from the record. Don Gilmore produced it with the band and Andy Wallace mixed it, and it's the cleanest distillation of what they did: Brad Delson's guitars crashing down like a wall, Rob Bourdon's drums driving hard, and Chester Bennington's voice cracking from a hurt murmur into a full-bore howl, with Mike Shinoda right there alongside him.

It's the sound of a band that figured out how to make nu metal ache instead of just rage, and it has become one of their best-known and most acclaimed songs. It spent 12 weeks on top of Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks across 2003 and 2004, three weeks at the head of the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, and reached number 11 on the Hot 100.

The band later reworked it with Jay-Z as "Numb/Encore", which won them the Grammy for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration. In March 2022 it became their second song, after "In the End", to pass 1 billion Spotify streams, and it's now 4x Platinum in the US.

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