If you went to an American high school between the years of 1998 and 2005, you were absolutely at the very least aware of Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory—it was everywhere in a way that albums could only pull off in a time when radio still shifted millions of units and before the internet really kicked into high gear. Chances are, you fucking loved it, too. It's the album that catapulted the then-hybrid rap-rock group to stardom; its four singles—"One Step Closer," "Papercut," "Crawling," and especially "In the End"—were everywhere, and thanks to its major label distribution, any kid with a Walkman and an allowance had access to it.

Linkin Park's debut arrived during rap rock's commercial peak, filling a quicksilver generational sweet spot between grunge's wilting omnipresence and the rise of the aggro, cartoonish nu-metal that would directly follow it. Hybrid Theory certainly didn't shy away from nu-metal tropes (peep the low-slung bass chug and whisper-screams on "Run Away"), but it felt different from the naked rage that bands like Slipknot and Korn peddled. Rather, Linkin Park seemed more tormented than anything else. Chester Bennington, who died yesterday at the age of 41, provided lyrics that were steeped in misery, his half-whispered dirges often dissolving into an enraged roar when confronted with the hypocrites, phonies, and bullies that acted as his invisible antagonists.

More than anything, Bennington sounded pissed, but it never came across as threatening or overly macho. There was a fragile quality to his voice, magnified by his slight frame and boyish good looks (I developed a crush on him immediately after seeing one of their videos on MTV). Whatever it was, it held us in thrall, and helped us make sense of a world that often seemed too big and cold. While many rockers of their era milked the "angry I-hate-my-Dad guy" trope for all it was worth (and in those days, when nu-metal records regularly went platinum, it was worth quite a lot of money), their anguish was genuine, fueled by Bennington's recollections of his rocky, abusive childhood.

His willingness to be frank about his own trauma provided comfort for millions of other kids struggling with tough times. The album's themes of disappointment, loneliness, and rebellion were instantly relatable to the angsty, frustrated, mopey kids that so many of us were, and the music itself—an appealingly odd, unthreatening blend of crunchy alt-rock, nu-metal, and hip-hop, punctuated by rapper Mike Shinoda's bars and Bennington's high, often pained vocals—was confrontational enough to feel dangerous, but accessible enough to keep us hooked. Live, they were electric; in the studio, they were fearless, continually pushing the already fluid boundaries of rap rock in every direction they could dream up. It was the perfect gateway album, in that the answers it offered were multiple choice; it led me to extreme metal, but it led others to hip-hop, and to electronic music, and to rock music in general. Even the most orthodox black metal fan or real hip-hop head has to start somewhere, and for millions of American kids, that starting point came courtesy of a few scrawny dudes from the LA suburbs.