Linkin Park Working on Album Scheduled for 2012

Following up their 2010 release A Thousand Suns, Linkin Park is working on a new album. While not titled and with no definite release date yet, the new album is expected to hit stores in 2012. According to frontman Chester Bennington in an interview with Rolling Stone: "We’re in the studio and we’re well on our way to making our next record. I can tell you that we have a lot of good music, a lot of quality songs."

Rick Rubin is producing the album. Rubin told Billboard: "Typically we'll have a once-a-week meeting to go listen to the songs that they're coming up with and talk about them. For so early in the project, they are much further along than they have been on the last two albums we did. On ['A Thousand Suns'] there were still a lot of irons in the fire. We knew, 'OK, we can't do this forever. Let's leave this batch and we'll come back and address it when we start up again.'"

The now-untitled album is the start of a series of releases expected to come out every 18 months. For a band that has only put out three albums over 10 years, is this doable? To meet this goal, the band is changing its strategy, doing more recording on the road and spending less time touring. Bennington stated to Rolling Stone: "Mike [Shinoda] and I are out there with our studios. Technology, thank God, has gotten to the point when what used to be three refrigerator-sized racks of equipment and a full board the size of a king bed can now fit in my back pack – and we're working on new music as we're driving in the car to a venue or in our hotel room, and when we come home, everybody works in their homes."

While fans likely will not appreciate truncated touring schedules, it’s a relief for the band. Bennington expressed his stance on touring in his Rolling Stone interview: "When we would tour for two years, even the most resilient person in the band, at the end of that, was f*cking miserable."