Never before seen photo of Linkin Park on the release day of Hybrid Theory surfaces

Okay, this is pretty cool. October 24th, 2000 was a day in history that almost every music fan knows well. It was, of course, the day Linkin Park’s years of hard work resulted in their genre-defining album Hybrid Theory. You know the accolades – it sold millions of albums and made the band almost overnight megastars. We’ve probably mentioned it so often that you’re sick of it by now (we’re not, though). It’s an album that so many bands are indebted to, from Bring Me The Horizon to From Ashes To New (to name but a couple).

Now, the fun part. A photo that Linkin Park Live posted on socials is apparently the first time a very special photo of the band has surfaced for public consumption. In particular, it’s a photo of Chester Bennington and the band’s merch guy at the time on the day Hybrid Theory released. At the time, Linkin Park was supporting Kottonmouth Kings on a major tour, at a time where Kottonmouth Kings were pretty big. Little did anyone know this support band, in the next 7 days, would sell over 50,000 copies of their debut album. The rest, of course, is history.

Oddly enough, both Phoenix and Chester Bennington predicted first-week album sales far below those 50k numbers. In fact, Phoenix only predicted 3k sold, while Bennington chimed in with an 8k guess. Suffice it to say they were pretty far off, because the record ended up selling that many copies in a single day for a long time.