New Linkin Park Album: 'A Lot Of Guitar Solos!'

Linkin Park have been locked in the studio working on a new studio album, and it looks like it’s packing a few surprises.

The band announced earlier this year that they were getting cracking on the follow-up to 2012′s Living Things, with Mike Shinoda recently suggesting that we might see it surface by the time they rock up to Download in June.

Now guitarist Brad Delson says that shred-happy LP warriors (erm, are there any of those?) will be very satisfied with the way the new opus is turning out.

“There’s a lot of guitar solos on the album!” he tells Music Radar. “And this is from someone who was quoted early on as saying I hated them. Not that I hated them as a listener; I just don’t want to play any; I shirked guitar solos. Early on, I felt as though the songs we were making aesthetically didn’t want them. This new batch of songs, to me, always want solos. I feel like every song has one.”

Brad also explained why the band decided to drop a new single so soon after announcing that they were in the studio, noting: “We wanted to get music out sooner than later. The timing just felt right with this song. We finished two songs relatively early in the process, and Guilty All The Same seems to inform the spirit of the record. For us, it’s the perfect lead offering to set the tone for the album as a whole.”

Expect that album to land around summer time. In the mean time, catch the rock heavyweights playing their seminal Hybrid Theory debut in full at Download in June.