In an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine, Linkin Park rapper and multi-instrumentalist Mike Shinoda explained that while he was working on the follow-up to their 2012 record Living Things - an album that had pop-friendly sensibilities, subsequently went gold and was their fourth LP to reach Number One on the Billboard 200 - he had a personal revelation. "Dude, what am I doing?" he asked himself. "I'm doing the exact same thing!" So he began writing heavy music.
"It needed to be visceral," he said with a laugh. "We need to weed out a lot of the soft, emo kind of approach to our music, and we need to weed out anything that feels aggressive for aggressive's sake. We're not 18-year-old kids making a loud record – we're 37-year-old adults making a loud record. And what makes a 37-year-old angry is different than what made us angry back in the day."
Members of System Of A Down and Rage Against The Machine have joined the fight here. Most of the material is reliably heavy. War and Wastelands find Chester Bennington's vocals soaring over a tumult of expensive-sounding noise. First single is Guilty all the same featuring Rakim and it packs a powerful punch.
If you want to stand a chance of winning a copy of the CD, answer the following question correctly: What was the title of Linkin Park’s first album:
a) Conspiracy Theory
b) Hybrid Theory
c) Fury Theory
Comment below. Winners will be notified Monday, 28 July.