World-dominating rockers Linkin Park release their ground breaking fourth album ‘A Thousand Suns’ next week, but we’re giving Premium users a chance to hear the album in advance over the weekend.

A Thousand Suns addresses various issues close to the band’s heart, from the recession to the conflicts in the Middle East, and is produced by legendary producer/guru Rick Rubin in collaboration with Mike Shinoda.

Lead vocalist Chester Bennington explains: “We’re not just making an album. The experiments that resulted filled the studio hard drive with diverse, abstract sounds, amorphous echoes, cacophonous samples, and handmade staccato merged into wandering, elusive melody. Each track felt like a hallucination.”

He continues: “We wanted to make a record that felt conceptual, a record that felt like as a whole that it told a story, a story that was very powerful and thoughtful. The album has some kind of feeling of that the entire album takes you on a journey and leads you down this path that is very visual and very emotionally charged.”

Click on the image above or here for an exclusive insight into the making of the album.

Enjoy!

The Black Angels album is the highly anticipated Phosphene Dream, set for release on September 13th. “Phosphene Dream” marks a giant leap forward for the band - produced and mixed by Dave Sardy (Oasis, Wolfmother,Black Mountain) over a period of six months in Los Angeles, the album showcases both sonically and musically a bold new direction for the band, a fresh take on the neo-Psychedelic movement they’ve been at the forefront of for a number of years.

Spotify Premium users can now hear the new album in full. All Spotify users can listen to the album on the official street release date (13th September).

The band plans to celebrate the release with a new tour. Having already performed all over Europe this summer (Reading and Leeds Festivals and Rock En Seine to name but a few) the guys are set to be back in Europe later this year on the following dates:

Thu 23 Sep – Vox Hall, Aarhus, Denmark
Fri 24 Sep – Loppen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Sat 25 Sep – Reeperbahn Festival, Hamburg, Germany
Sun 26 Sep – Melkweg, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Mon 27 Sep – Comet Club, Berlin, Germany
Wed 29 Sep – Abart, Zurich, Switzerland
Thu 30 Sep – Les Docks, Lausanne, Switzerland
Fri 1 Oct – Bronson, Ravenna, Italy
Sat 2 Oct – Tunnel, Milan, Italy
Mon 4 Oct – Botanique Orangerie, Brussels, Belgium
Wed 6 Oct – Thekla, Bristol
Thu 7 Oct – Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London
Sat 9 Oct – Captain’s Rest, Glasgow
Sun 10 Oct – Ruby Lounge, Manchester
Mon 11 Oct – Crawdaddy, Dublin

When Robert Plant collected the 2009 Grammy for Album of the Year for Raising Sand, and a further five more for his work with bluegrass singer Alison Krauss, it confirmed that Plant was hungry to build on his substantial musical legacy.

His new album, Band Of Joy, was recorded at Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ Woodland studio in Nashville, an important hub from the Seventies which the pair rescued from closure. Despite Plant’s name being above the album’s title, Band of Joy - named in honour of his pre-Zeppelin psychedelic blues outfit - is a collective endeavour built on a mutual love of high-powered roots rock, country, folk and gospel.

“After all the things I’ve done, the idea of just stepping forward with other people and letting them take the lead is an exciting prospect,” says Plant. “Nothing is daunting for me – but forever challenging. I have to be able to just get out there into the great drift of music and possibility, and hang onto great themes and ideas.”

The album makes for Plant’s most eclectic work so far, an album which continues the explorations of Raising Sand into exciting new territory.

Spotify Premium users can now get a first glimpse of his new album Band Of Joy on an exclusive six-track Spotify EP - plus from the 13th they’ll be able to hear the
album in full.

Grammy-nominated hard rock band Disturbed’s new studio album Asylum is the follow-up to their 2008 platinum selling Indestructible, which spawned the smash hit single “Inside the Fire”.

Formed in Chicago in 1996, Disturbed have sold 11 million albums and six million digital tracks worldwide. Indestructible debuted at Number One on Billboard’s Top 200 album chart in June 2008 and remained in the Top 10 for five weeks. It was the band’s third consecutive Number One album, following their platinum-sellers Believe (2002) and Ten Thousand Fists (2005), making Disturbed one of only six rock bands in history to score three consecutive Number One debuts with studio albums.

As of today listeners can check out the new album, Asylum, and Spotify Premium listeners can hear an exclusive album with live tracks from their recent tour.

Hurts and Manchester novelist Joe Stretch have created a wonderfully unique experience on Spotify in which you get to play the protagonist.

Narrated by actress Anna Friel, ‘Don’t Let Go’ is an interactive audio novel which utilises Spotify in a completely new and unexpected way. Each chapter of the novel has been published as a track on Spotify, and can be located by typing a unique code into the search field.

After listening to each chapter of the story you’ll be offered a choice of what to do next, along with the unique code for each action. Your mission - should you choose to accept it - is to stop arch villain Guy Lockhart from distributing his heartbreak cocktail and condemning humankind forever to a loveless, empty existence.

Along the way you’ll also hear extracts of music from Hurts’ brand new album “Happiness”. If you manage to get to one of the story’s eleven possible endings without dying, you’ll be rewarded with an exclusive preview of an album track. So choose wisely…

Katy Perry’s hotly awaited new album ‘Teenage Dream‘ is being released on Monday 30th August, with her dazzling new single of the same name, out the day before on Sunday 29th. Sign up to Spotify Premium and listen to an exclusive pre-release sampler today.

Katy has teamed up exclusively with Spotify to offer subscribers one hell of a nice prize. To celebrate the release of Katy’s new single and album, you could win £500 worth of Topshop vouchers to help update your wardrobe, alongside a whole host of signed Katy Perry goodies.

To be included simply register on the contest page by 6th September when the competition closes - good luck!

The hotly-tipped Rumer has released her first single, ‘Slow’, as an exclusive to Spotify our listeners can discover this great new artist starting today.

Driven by a stop-what-you’re-doing voice, ‘Slow’ is a smouldering, unrequited love song, and a tantalising taste of her self-penned debut album (due in the autumn). Rumer’s debut album is a beautiful, autobiographical yet brilliantly universal record. ‘Slow’ is just a glimpse into an array
of timeless, quality pop songs,