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"Blackout" is the ninth track on A Thousand Suns. The song was streamed on Linkin Park's official MySpace page on September 8, 2010 to promote the album prior to the US release.[2][3]
"Blackout" is one of the most unique songs on A Thousand Suns, featuring Chester screaming in scat vocal style above an electronic instrumental. It builds with intense and angry vocals until its glitchy bridge leads into a piano section that builds again to end the song. Bennington's chorus was scratched up and imbued with stutter edits by Hahn, then run through a Thermionic Culture Vulture valve distortion unit and recorded back into the MPC, where each member took turns handplaying different patterns through the pads. "We had about 30 passes of each guy rocking out, and everyone had a different style," says Delson. "We took the best moments and comped them into that cutout vocal solo."[4]
The band had particular trouble on the lyrics and vocal with this track, so they went to Rick Rubin for ideas. Mike explained that the track originally started as nothing but "Chester... screaming gibberish over the crazy dance-style track, and there were no words. And every time we tried to put words to it, the lyrics felt like too left-brained, we were thinking too hard and it didn’t feel like a gut spill to use Rick’s words."[5] He told them to try automatic writing, a "technique he used with Johnny Cash and Neil Young, which basically means you get up on the mic and let the words flow. Going in there and actually doing it was terrifying at first but then the words just started coming out of nowhere, it was really surreal. It added a certain soul to the record and without that, I think it would have been really rigid and digital."[6] This is documented on the LPTV episode "Blackout Freestyle".[7]
In an LPU Chat in August 2011, Chester stated that "Blackout" was the hardest song to write off of the album. He did scat vocals (original melody by making sounds) and it was difficult to put words to it. The song was written in 3 parts, so they had to make sure they fit together.[8][9] He also stated that "Blackout" and "Robot Boy" were some of the most fun to record due to the many elements foun
2026-01-15 00:43:05