Linkin Park were hardly in need of a makeover when they arrived at their third album in 2007. Their two previous records, 2000’s Hybrid Theory and the 2003 follow-up Meteora, had sold by the bucketload and made the nu-metal rap-rock crew from California huge. But, led by their late frontman Chester Bennington, Linkin Park weren’t the sorts to settle into a comfort zone. Their 2004 collaboration with Jay-Z was previous evidence of their willingness to venture into the unknown, a move that Bennington knew might have cost them a few fans who didn’t want their rock band introducing a hip-hop superstar to their sound. “For rock fans in general, the whole Jay-Z thing might well have been hard to swallow,” Bennington told Classic Rock’s Dave Ling, “but the average Linkin Park fan found it really exciting.”
Doubling down on that approach, they enlisted the services of Rick Rubin for the album that would become Minutes To Midnight. Who better to help the band hone their meld of rock and hip-hop than the man who once produced albums by Run-DMC, Slayer and Beastie Boys all in the same year? Famed for guiding artists through a creative reset, the Def Jam co-founder helped Linkin Park rip it up and start again. “Hybrid Theory and Meteora were similar in many ways,” Bennington told Classic Rock. “When it came to making [Minutes To Midnight], we knew all too well that the music had to change – a lot. With what we’d done before, we almost put ourselves in a cage. It was time to break free of that.”
