Meteora is the second studio album by American rock band Linkin Park. It was released on March 25, 2003 through Warner Bros. Records, following Reanimation, a collaboration album which featured remixes of songs included on debut studio album Hybrid Theory. Linkin Park released singles from Meteora for over a year, including "Somewhere I Belong", "Faint", "Numb", "From the Inside" and "Breaking the Habit". The song "Lying from You" was released as a promotional single. Meteora takes its title from the Greek Orthodox monasteries.

Meteora is the most successful album in the history of the Alternative Songs chart, a chart that specializes in radio play of alternative songs. As of 2013, the album has sold over 20 million copies worldwide, and is certified six times platinum by the RIAA. Meteora was also ranked number 36 on Billboards Top 200 Albums of the Decade.The song "Session" was nominated for the 2004 Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance, losing to Jeff Beck's "Plan B". Some songs from the album were remixed with some of Jay-Z's songs for the EP Collision Course.

Background and production

Meteora, which was co-produced Don Gilmore,features a mixture of the band's previous nu metal and rap metal styles with newer innovative effects. "Nobody's Listening" features a sample from the band's track "High Voltage", which appears on the B-side for the single "One Step Closer" and the bonus disc of Hybrid Theory. The sample is a distorted version of Mike Shinoda's rapping line that is in the chorus of "High Voltage" where he states "Coming at you from every side". The track also includes the induction of a shakuhachi, a Japanese flute made of bamboo. "Breaking the Habit" features an electronica-influenced sound, live strings and guitar. This is an exception from their previous nu metal/rap rock performances, as no distorted guitar riffs, nor any rapping vocals from Mike Shinoda are included – a style they would further explore on the albums A Thousand Suns and Living Things. Linkin Park comprehensively rehearsed the album, recording more than forty choruses for the first single "Somewhere I Belong".

In a retrospective interview, Chester Bennington stated "We knew what we wanted, and we knew how to execute to a certain degree. However, we were also just going for it. We didn't really care about what anybody else was doing. We also didn't care whether or not the songs fit together stylistically as a whole or a collection of songs."

Other editions

There is a special edition of Meteora, which includes the "Making of Meteora" DVD documentary. They are packaged together in a blue tinted case with the blue Meteora cover that can be found in some parts of Asia, United States, and more commonly in India. The India version contains an alternate DVD and alternative cover that is packaged in a slimline case with the disc in original packaging. The "Tour Edition" of Meteora is packaged in a two disc set. The second disc, which is a Video CD, has the music videos for "Somewhere I Belong", "Faint", "Numb", and "Breaking the Habit". The tour edition is packaged in a standard Compact Disc case, rather than their trademark digipak case. The album was also released on a very limited quantity of vinyl records (spread across two LPs) under Warner Brothers. These are coveted by collectors and fetch high prices at auction.

In its first week it debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 and sold an estimated 810,000 units. It sold 5,913,000 copies in the US alone and over 20 million copies worldwide.The album was ranked number 36 on Billboard's Hot 200 Albums of the Decade.

Meteora received generally positive reviews, although critics noted that the album's musical style was similar to its predecessor, Hybrid Theory (2000). The overall Metacritic score is 62.E! Online rated it an A, and expected it to "shoot straight for the stars".Entertainment Weekly described it as "radio-friendly perfection". Dot Music described it as a "guaranteed source of ubiquitous radio hits".Rolling Stone said the band "squeezed the last remaining life out of this nearly extinct formula".Billboard Magazine described Meteora as "a ready-made crowdpleaser".The New Musical Express said it had "massive commercial appeal" but left the reviewer "underwhelmed".Allmusic described it as "nothing more and nothing less than Hybrid Theory Part 2.", adding "More importantly, the group has discipline and editing skills, keeping this record at a tight 36 minutes and 41 seconds, a move that makes it considerably more listenable than its peers and, by extension, more powerful, since they know where to focus their energy, something that many nu-metal bands simply do not."

Blender described it as "harder, denser, uglier",while Q described it as "less an artistic endeavor than an exercise in target marketing."Entertainment Weekly gave the album a B+, calling it a "thunderously hooky album that seamlessly blends the group's disparate sonic elements into radio-friendly perfection"

The song "Session" was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance in 2004.