Linkin Park celebrate Minutes To Midnight anniversary with making-of documentary

With Linkin Park's third album Minutes To Midnight celebrating its 14th anniversary on May 14, the band have uploaded their 40-minute making-of documentary to YouTube.

The film was originally released on the same day as the LP as a limited-edition bonus DVD, detailing Chester Bennington, Rob Bourdon, Brad Delson, Joe Hahn, Dave 'Phoenix' Farrell and Mike Shinoda's process in following up 2003’s Meteora. (Bonus: it even includes the band recording rare demos, as well as the usual big-hitters like Given Up.)

Read this: "You can shove nu-metal up your ass!": The inside story of Linkin Park’s Minutes To Midnight

And you can immediately understand their mindsets going into it, Chester declaring right at the start: "What we were kind of preparing ourselves for was to try and re-develop the sound of the band from every aspect – which is kind of a scary thought."

He added: "We didn't want to lose anything that people might enjoy about the band, but we also didn't want to make a trilogy; we didn't want to make another album that sounded like what people would expect."

Watch the Making Of Minutes To Midnight below:

Back in March, Mike revealed that he actually thought A Thousand Suns was the band's most "polarising" album, following 2000 debut Hybrid Theory, 2003’s Meteora and, of course, Minutes To Midnight.

"It got one or five stars by everybody, so we ended up with three-star ratings all over the board because half the people hated it with all of their heart and soul," he said.

Reflecting on it now, though, Mike continued, "Now we’re at a point where if you ask the average person who’s relatively familiar with the band what their favourite record is, a lot of them say that one. It’s changed, the whole relationship with the band has changed. People go, like, 'Man, that was like the first album I ever bought, that’s how I learned to play guitar! And then I moved on to guitar that was harder…’

“And that was part of the thing we were like, 'Yeah, Brad [Delson, guitar] could actually play much more difficult stuff…’ But we loved how that sounded and we wanted to make stuff that a kid who couldn’t really play guitar, and he’d be like, 'Yeah, let’s play this riff!’ I appreciate that being older, I do love the idea of being in a position to maybe be a good teacher or a role model if I know something that somebody else doesn’t know.”

Read this: 10 lesser known Linkin Park songs that everyone needs to hear