Minutes to Midnight (Linkin Park album) Minutes to Midnight (Linkin Park album) Minutes to Midnight is the third studio album by American rock band Linkin Park, released on May 14, 2007, through Warner Bros. Records. The album was produced by Mike Shinoda and Rick Rubin. "Minutes to Midnight" was the band's follow-up album to "Meteora" (2003) and features a shift in the group's musical direction. For the band, the album marks a beginning of deviation from their signature nu metal sound. "Minutes to Midnight" takes its title from the Doomsday Clock. It is also the first Linkin Park full-length album to carry a Parental Advisory label.
2 Minutes to Midnight and Bruce Dickinson. The song title references the Doomsday Clock, the symbolic clock used by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which represents a countdown to potential global catastrophe. In September 1953 the clock reached two minutes to midnight, the closest it ever got to midnight, when the United States and Soviet Union tested H-bombs within nine months of one another. The atomic clock, set at 12 minutes to midnight in 1972, regressed thereafter among USSoviet tensions, reaching three minutes to midnight in 1984 – the year this track was released – and at that time the most dangerous clock