Linkin Park - Living Things LP

Rick Rubin closed out his run with Linkin Park here, the third and final time he sat across the board from Mike Shinoda after Minutes to Midnight and A Thousand Suns, with the whole thing cut at NRG Recording Studios for Warner Bros./Machine Shop. Shinoda built it by pulling from across the band's own catalog, stacking singles like "Burn It Down" and "Lost in the Echo" into something that still shoved its way to Number 1 on the Billboard 200, edging out Maroon 5's Overexposed that same week, and topped the charts in the UK and more than a dozen other countries besides. Call it the sound of a band eating its own tail and winning.