Linkin Park Team Up With Rick Rubin For New Album

In a recent interview lead singer of rock group Linkin Park, Chester Bennington, stated that the group is hard at work on their fifth studio album set for release in late 2012 with legendary producer, Rick Rubin. Bennington talks about a return to their “older sound” and a movement away from politics stating, “we’re not a political band.” This sounds like good news for Linkin Park fans who gave their last album “A Thousand Suns” very mixed reviews…lopsided towards content.

Check out the summarised interview below.

Linkin Park singer Chester Bennington is opening up about the band’s upcoming, fifth studio album, and unlike past albums, he says the guys didn’t feel pressure to “break out of the nu-metal box” with this assortment. That mindset, he says, resulted in a more comfortable recoding experience.

Overall, Bennington promises a more familiar set: “With this album, we’ve incorporated a lot of guitar work with big choruses and the heavier electronic stuff to give it that really big wall of sound feeling without getting too metal,” he told Kerring! “This will be more familiar to people than ‘A Thousand Suns’ was, where we were like ‘ …We’re just going to go bonkers.”

He then addressed the “nu-metal” issue: “Over the previous two records, we were trying hard to break out of the nu-metal box that we’d found ourselves in. It’s very easy to characterize us as that based on ‘Hybrid Theory’ and ‘Meteora’, but we knew there was more to us than that. With the exception of the metal guitar tone we had on the first two records – which, I think is the reason that a lot of people really like the band – I feel like we’ve found a place where we’ve become in our skin.”

Bennington also says the guys are moving away from politically-charged lyrics on the upcoming release. “We’ve been writing a lot about relationships. We’re not a political band, we’re a socially minded band,” he said. “We try to look at things that we find in the world that we’d like to see more of, or that we’d like to see less of.” Linkin Park are currently working on their fifth album in Los Angeles and are shooting to release it this summer.