“It was a very early education in genre-bending and rule-breaking that set me on the path to where I am today, creatively,” says Jordan Benjamin, who male emotional, politicised alternative rock as grandson. Bridging generations, it’s a record that was inspiring then and continues to inspire to this day. The introspective nature of the album’s lyrics, which dealt with mental health (’Crawlin’), familial trauma (‘Runaway’) and adolescent angst (‘Points of Authority’), helped the band form a lifelong connection between band and audience. “Hip-hop felt like a neo punk rock in some way and as far as subject matter, we were definitely all about fighting against the system and lifting up a big middle finger.“ “All the music we liked was rebellious,” Hahn says. ![]() Everything from the record’s Banksy-inspired street art artwork to what the band stood for felt like a protest. With the release of their hip-hop heavy remix album ‘Reanimation’ in 2002, the band continued to do things their own way. They played over 300 shows to promote the album (says Hahn: “It felt like we had to prove ourselves every time we went onstage”) and pushed against the nu-metal label that was ascribed to them by the media. ![]() We were just kids being expected to headline big festivals with 40 minutes of music. “The expectations of us as a band were growing so quickly. “In the studio, there was a lot of anxiety to get it right.” Those worries didn’t stop when they finally released the album they’d been dreaming about for years. “They only seem like big songs in retrospect,” Shinoda says. To this day, it remains one of the biggest-selling rock albums of all time, having shifted more than 27 million copies, making it, commercially, the biggest rock record of the 21st Century. Meanwhile, the record earned the band a Grammy (‘Crawlin’’ took Best Hard Rock Performance) and became the best-selling album of the year. The likes of the elegiac ‘In The End’, the serrated ‘Crawlin’ and the ferocious ‘One Step Closer’ dominated music television and gave confused, emotional teenagers a voice. That fierce determination paid off with ‘Hybrid Theory’. “If we couldn’t do it our own way,” Farrell says, “it wasn’t worth doing.” Chester refused, as he and the rest of Linkin Park knew exactly what they wanted to do. At one point, the label floated the idea of replacing Shinoda and making Bennington the sole frontman of a straight-up rock band. “We had a lot of people telling us to do something different,” bassist Dave Farrell explains. Even then, they had to fight to create the record they wanted. It was only after early supporter Jeff Blue took the Vice President job at Warner Records that the band got picked up. People just didn’t understand who would buy into this weird blitz of styles. With a handful of demos, the group played 45 label showcases and were turned down after every single one. ![]() It wasn’t our goal to hit the masses, though.” We knew there were people like us out there and we just wanted to get our music to them. “We were all products of our environment so as a band, we weren’t worried about people not getting it. “Music today represents that blending of genres a lot better than it did at the time,” Hahn, the band’s DJ, tells NME over Zoom, harking back to the days where playgrounds were full of kids defined by what was playing through their headphones. That’s to be expected in 2020, but at the time it was a sledgehammer to the norm. Of course, there were music obsessives already devouring a little bit of everything – just like Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda, Chester Bennington, Rob Bourdon, Brad Delson, Dave Farrell and Joe Hahn, who wanted their band to blend their love of hip-hop, rock and electronica. With the rapidly-growing popularity of file-sharing sites Napster and Limewire gifting a generation of kids access to every type of music all at once – rather than just what was played on the radio or what their pocket-money could afford – ‘Hybrid Theory’ was the perfect, angst-riddled introduction to everything, all at once. Released October 24 2000, it crashed into a mainstream that was just starting to shrug off the idea of genre boundaries and proved that music could be vulnerable, furious and play by its own rules. More than just the jewel in nu-metal’s checkered crown, the record, which turns 20 this month, kicked down walls between genres and opened up a realm of possibility for teenagers around the world. Everyone from Billie Eilish and Brockhampton to Twenty One Pilots, Bring Me The Horizon and Yungblud owes a debt to Linkin Park’s revolutionary debut album. It’s also one of the most influential albums of all time, in any genre. A furious blend of hip-hop swagger, rock catharsis, pop ambition and electronic escapism, ‘Hybrid Theory’ is the most important rock album of the past two decades.
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