A Thousand Suns Songwriting Credits by Linkin Park

A Thousand Suns is the fourth studio album by Linkin Park, released in September 2010 on Warner Bros. Records and produced by Rick Rubin and Mike Shinoda, the band's most conceptually ambitious album, organized as a continuous 15-track suite addressing the threat of nuclear annihilation and incorporating speech samples from Robert Oppenheimer, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mario Savio within a primarily electronic and atmospheric production. Bennington and Shinoda co-wrote all material; the album is the band's most experimental work, with the electronic production and tonal darkness placing it closer to Nine Inch Nails than to the commercial rock of the first two albums. 'The Catalyst,' 'Waiting for the End,' and 'Iridescent' were the principal singles; the album debuted at number four on the Billboard 200 with 165,000 first-week sales, a significantly lower commercial performance than previous releases, reflecting the difficulty of translating the conceptual ambition into mainstream radio play. A Thousand Suns is the most critically debated album in the band's catalog, praised by reviewers who valued the thematic ambition and criticized by those who found the electronic framework a poor fit for Bennington's vocal strengths, and it is the clearest evidence of the band's willingness to sacrifice commercial certainty for creative risk.