Three albums into a long experiment, Linkin Park stopped drifting and pulled the electronics and the rapping back into the same room. Living Things arrived in June 2012 as the band's fifth studio album, out on Warner Bros. Records and Machine Shop Records, first in Japan on the 20th and everywhere else the following week.

Mike Shinoda produced it with Rick Rubin at NRG Recording Studios, the third record the pair built together after Minutes to Midnight in 2007 and A Thousand Suns in 2010. Their partnership ends here. No Linkin Park album after this one carries Rubin's name, which gives the whole thing the weight of a closing chapter for anyone who follows the band by its producers.

The genre tags name the compromise: alternative rock, electronic rock and rap rock, all three at once instead of one at a time. Anyone who bounced off the concept-album sprawl of A Thousand Suns gets shorter songs and bigger hooks again. Anyone who came for the synth work keeps it. The record sits at the meeting point of the two audiences Linkin Park had spent five years splitting, and it plays best if you remember which side you were on.