Man, this one’s a doozie, as this is definitely a Linkin Park album (which for me is already bad enough) but a good one too at that. Given how this was released back in ye olde 2007 you can expect that juicy nostalgic rock band music that only special types of skaters from the early 2010’s would listen to (I mean for fucks sake, one of this album’s songs was featured in a Transformers live-action movie).

               This album is so good that it either becomes a juicy audio juice of throbbing, hard rock that’s just as hard as my boner whenever I think of hot goth milfs or becomes a depressive serenade of relatability that is either about politics or about one’s true feelings (which I unfortunately still relate to) which both manage to perfectly incapsulate the band’s personality and their integrity from over the years. It takes the socioemotionality of Meteora but it doesn’t fuck you that hard in the feels. It even takes the hard bangs and thumps of Hybrid Theory but they’re not as memorable. It’s like a perfect balance of things Linkin Park has mastered over the years and did a damn fine job balancing ‘em out, which I still think that it reinforces the idea (in some way) that Chester Bennington and Mike Shinoda are THE voices of the wretched, the broken and the suicidal.

               What I really like about this album is the serious drive of the team to constantly try to reinvent themselves which lead to them trying to be more creative which thus leads to the trials and tribulations out of which this album was birthed from. For an example, the fact that Brad Delson (their guitarist) did a funny little thing for the second track of the album “Given up” where he shoved into the song a bunch of samples of sounds of clapping and keys jiggling. Or for the song “Shadow of the day” where they’ve gone through many different changes for the keyboard loop in the background, from pianos to acoustic guitars to even electric banjos, a bunch of fuckin’ samples were made with a bunch of fuckin instruments before they just sticked to the reversed digital keyboard, which I thing it fits better (but I still want an electric banjo version not gonna lie). The motherfuckers really experimented with a bunch of different shit and to do whole rewrites of certain songs in order to break from the edgy monotony generated from their success (who knew DJ Khaled was right, suffering from success really does happen, huh?) which I think that it really paid off in the end, as this album was certified FIVE TIMES PLATINUN IN THE US, which is just fucking amazing, just like what I think that this album overall

It’s a 9.79/10, if I we’re to ever kill myself the first thing I’m going to write in my suicide letter will be the lyrics to “Leave out all the rest” it is that fucking good.

Here's a link to a YT playlist of it