Yeah, that's right.

You see, this would be the point where I say “LINKIN PARK IS BACK!” but this isn’t Linkin Park. And for the first time, I feel that’s for the best. Let’s admit it: Minutes To Midnight was an attempt to distance themselves from a sound, not an attempt to make a great record. It was okay, but it was overall throwaway. Mike, Chester, Joe, Phoenix, Brad and Rob are still trying to distance themselves from the dead (or what should be dead) genre of nu-metal after becoming the pinnacle of it, but it looks like this time they are trying to do something more than just run away from the past. But the almighty question(s) is this: Is this better than what they have done before? Has Linkin Park finally proved they can make music that has the same energy, emotion and awesomeness as Hybrid Theory and Meteora? Have they finally been able to make themselves a band instead of just a snapshot of the music industry in the early 2000′s? When am I going to stop asking questions and start answering them? Right about now, actually.

Let me start off by answering the question everyone is asking: This blows Minutes To Midnight out of the fucking water. Linkin Park HAS finally proved they are a band instead of just a snapshot of the music industry in the early 2000′s. But, this isn’t enough to erase the snapshot altogether, it’s just able to have the word “band” scribbled under the polaroid. While it still has traces of Minutes To Midnight on it, it isn’t a steaming pile of alt-rock. To tell you the truth, it isn’t a pile of anything specific. It’s a giant mix of everything and is kinda confusing to be completely honest.

Don’t get me wrong, this album isn’t shit. This isn’t Kesha (I refuse to use the dollar sign) or Justin Bieber, but this isn’t The Fragile. It feels more like an experiment than an album. A test more than a final product. And you can tell that’s what they were going for. It was meant to be an experience. That’s why, if you got the special edition of it on iTunes, there’s a track called “A Thousand Suns: The Full Experience”. It’s not meant to be easy to swallow and, while that usually works, it actually ends up being quite hard to get used to it being in your throat. You don’t get it at first and it requires multiple listens to fully appreciate it, but it does grow on you.

We were introduced to the new sound with “The Catalyst”, which is the album’s 6 minute, half-electro, half-stadium rock single, and it didn’t seem abnormally drastic from their normal stuff. Sure, it was different, but it wasn’t completely left field. (It was a couple degrees short.) Then we got treated to “Wretches And Kings” and shit started to get very head-scratch worthy. Then we got “Waiting For The End”, which added to the scratching. Then we got the album. We’ve been scratching our heads so much that we’re starting to get skin under our fingernails and the album just made us scratch so much that we started to draw blood.

It’s not accessible. At all. That’s not a bad thing, but when you are band that’s as massive as Linkin Park, that could back you into a corner. Back in the day, they were pushing it by having an instrumental track on their record. Today, they are pushing it by having three minutes of filler tracks before the first real song. (There is a total of six filler tracks on this record.) And while “Burning In The Sky” is an easily-accessible yet still experimental track (and sounds like it would be a really heavy track), the training wheels are taken off right away with “When They Come For Me”. It’s titled like a ballad, it’s actually a track with an intensely-layered tribal beat and immensely distorted synths. We get the rare treat of Mike rapping a lot more on this record, but the rapping here feels more like Fort Minor than Linkin Park, which is understandable but out of place.

But this album does get the award for Best Song Title with “Robot Boy”. If you couldn’t tell already, this album likes to have misleading titles. “Robot Boy” sounds like it would be a very industrial or electronic song, but it’s a ballad with piano and strings. It’s actually one of the most uplifting songs Linkin Park has ever made.

Throughout the rest of the album, we get everything from layered ballads to “WTF?!” worthy combinations. A perfect example of the latter being “Blackout”, which has Chester screaming extremely intensely but is made up of a simplistic drum machine beat and very melodic piano. It’s the songs like this that really show the attempt and want to make something different and unexpected, but those songs never seem to be able to pull of the magic trick they are trying to.

A Thousand Suns is a great successor to the ultimately disappointing Minutes To Midnight and actually ends up surpassing it greatly. While it’s not hard proof that Linkin Park is a force to be reckoned with in any genre other than nu-metal, it is enough to make you turn your head and realize that they aren’t chained to the early 2000′s.  This is the right move for Linkin Park and they seem to be getting a grip on what they should do with the band’s direction. With that said though, A Thousand Suns seems to be more of a way to prove to themselves that they can do something other than nu-metal well than an actual attempt to do it. We’re not reaping the fruits of their success of becoming something more than a snapshot, we’re just observing their journey to that point. And that’s not really a bad thing.

A Thousand Suns by Linkin Park gets a 4 out of 5.