It's Minutes To Midnight For Linkin Park

Linkin Park's long-awaited and much talked-about third studio album, Minutes To Midnight, will arrive in stores sometime past 12:01 a.m. on May 15.

The disc was produced by the band's Mike Shinoda and Rick Rubin (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Run DMC), who won this year's Grammy Award for best producer for his work with the Dixie Chicks. It was recorded at the Mansion studio in Laurel Canyon, California.

Linkin Park wrote more than 100 song demos and spent more than 14 months in the studio working on Minutes To Midnight. They think that it was worth the wait and all the work.

"We wrote in new ways, and used instruments and equipment we hadn't experimented with, from vintage guitars and amps to mellotron to Rick's original 808 drum machine he used on the Beastie Boys first record," says Shinoda. "We tried to question every step in our songwriting process."

Rubin says the band tried to reinvent themselves on the Warner Bros./Machine Shop album.

"It doesn't sound like rap-rock. It's very melodic -- a progressive record."

Linkin Park will soon launch LPTV, a series of webisodes that will air on their site and show what bassist Dave "Phoenix" Farrell describes as "unseen footage of the history of Linkin Park, building up to an inside look at the studio experience of the new album."

Linkin Park have sold more than 40 million records worldwide since arriving on the scene with their debut album in 2000.

The sextet will perform at the Bamboozle music festival in New Jersey on May 6 before heading to Europe for a series of festival appearances. A full-scale North American tour is expected this summer.