Linkin Park Rocks New Album On Jimmy Kimmel Live

With 50 million albums sold worldwide, Linkin Park plans to add nearly a quarter million to that total next week with the debut of their new album. But before those totals are made official and entered into the record books, the band stopped by the stage at "Jimmy Kimmel Live" to rock some late night fans not one but two nights in a row.

Where better to perform your latest No. 1 song than on late night television? That was the idea behind Linkin Park's recent visit to ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live" this past week to not only celebrate that feat but to also announce the release of their latest album, Living Things.

The California-based band gave their fans a double double-dose of music, appearing on the late night talk show Wednesday and Thursday nights and performing two songs each time. On Wednesday's show, the group performed "Burn It Down," the first single from Living Things and the current No. 1 song on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, and 2003's "Faint" (from the album Meteora) another of the band's ten No. 1 Rock Track songs. They returned the following night with another selection, "Lies Greed Misery," from the new album and "New Divide" from the second "Transformers" movie soundtrack.

Linkin Park originally formed in 1996, according to All Music Guide, around a trio of budding rock star wannabes (Mike Shinoda, Rob Bourdon, and Brad Delson) calling themselves Xero, but they really took shape when Chester Bennington joined the group as the new singer. Experimenting with a rap-rock hybridized sound, the band called themselves Hybrid Theory for awhile in 1998 but soon went with a misspelling of a park in Santa Monica -- Linkin Park. Hybrid Theory became the name of their first EP and their first major label full-length album, the latter of which would almost top the Billboard 200 (peaking at No. 2) and go on to sell over 24 million copies worldwide, the biggest selling debut album by any artist in the 21st century.

The band's next three studio albums would debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. Billboard expects Living Things to become Linkin Park's fifth consecutive No. 1 album. Besides four straight studio albums, the band topped the chart with 2004's MTV Ultimate Mash-Ups Presents: Collision Course, recorded with rap legend Jay-Z.

Linkin Park has sold over 50 million albums worldwide.

In all, the band has placed 25 songs on various charts since "One Step Closer" debuted in 2000. They have enjoyed ten No. 1 songs on the Alternative chart, six on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, and three chart-toppers on the Modern Rock chart (which began listing in 2009). Their biggest hit on the pop charts came in 2001 with the fourth song released from Hybrid Theory, "In The End," which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. They have had two other hits crack the Top 10 -- "What I've Done" (No. 7) from 2007's Minutes To Midnight and "New Divide" from the 2009 soundtrack Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen -- The Album (and various bonus editions of 2010's A Thousand Suns.

Living Things was released Tuesday, June 26.

Linkin Park will hit the road in August, touring with Incubus.

Check out the band's performance of "Burn It Down" on "Jimmy Kimmel Live":

(photo credit: Madder Gibbler, Creative Commons)

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