At a time when rock stars had begun taking themselves a little too seriously, Queen was a band of unapologetic entertainers who hid their musical sophistication in bubblegum hooks and a campy sense of the absurd. Bassist John Deacon, guitarist Brian May, lead singer Freddie Mercury and drummer Roger Taylor began playing together in the post-Beatles feeding frenzy of early ‘70s London. They made expensive and ambitious albums that sold poorly at first, but their unique sound and approach eventually won over nearly every segment of the music listening public.
Indeed, Queen excelled at everything that was going on at the time (glam rock, heavy metal, progressive rock, piano-based pop) and also channeled an assortment of other styles few if any serious rock bands were attempting (opera, Broadway show tunes, sea shanties). Each member wrote great songs, with all but Deacon singing lead, but Mercury invariably voiced the hits. By many estimations the greatest rock frontman who ever lived, he stalked the stage like a shameless ham, and in the studio, he was prone to overdubbing so many vocal harmonies that there wasn’t room on the tape for anything else.
Mercury’s sexual orientation wasn’t exactly a secret (he told an interviewer, “I’m as gay as a daffodil, my dear” in 1974), but his personal life and childhood in Zanzibar remained somewhat obscure behind the mask of the consummate performer. Mercury was diagnosed with AIDS in 1987 and quietly withdrew from touring and making public appearances, but continued recording with Queen until his death in 1991.
Since then, Queen’s songs have never lost their ubiquitous grip on the English-speaking world. The band’s catalog has also enjoyed periodic surges of renewed interest over the years, from a memorable lip sync scene in 1992’s Wayne’s World to the 2018 biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, for which Rami Malek won Best Actor for his portrayal of Mercury.
With Disney+ having just begun streaming the 1981 concert film Queen Rock Montreal, we’re taking a look back through the peaks and valleys of the band’s recorded discography.
16. Flash Gordon (1980)
George Lucas had long wanted to direct the big-screen adaptation of the ‘30s space adventure comic Flash Gordon, and when he didn’t get the job, he created a little movie called Star Wars instead. When the Flash Gordon movie finally arrived in theaters in 1980, it couldn’t help but be overshadowed by the Star Wars phenomenon, despite a larger budget and music by one of the biggest bands in the world. Queen’s soundtrack album is mostly instrumental outside of the deliriously over-the-top theme song “Flash” and occasional reprises of its chorus, with lots of dialogue and sound effects from the movie blaring over the music. It’s fun to hear Queen flex their musical chops with some proggy instrumentals at a time when their proper albums were focused on concise, radio-ready pop songs, and May gets to shred all over “Battle Theme.” Still, this is purely an album for completists.
15. The Cosmos Rocks with Paul Rodgers (2008)
May and Taylor have performed Queen’s hits on stage with a multitude of impressive vocalists in the decades since Mercury’s death, including lengthy tours with Bad Company frontman Paul Rodgers and American Idol champion Adam Lambert. Only once have they added a new album to their studio discography, and the Rodgers-fronted The Cosmos Rocks affirmed May and Taylor still had pretty strong instincts about how a Queen record should sound. Rodgers, who was in his late 50s at the time, could hit the same high notes as Mercury, but he has little of his predecessor’s personality, so the songs often sound more like Free or Bad Company than Queen. Foo Fighters resident Queen superfan Taylor Hawkins sings backup on “C-lebrity,” one of the only songs that really conjures the attitude of ‘70s Queen. Overall, The Cosmos Rocks probably should have been a respectable debut album from a supergroup instead of an insufficient attempt at trying to recapture the Queen magic. “The songs might have sounded less awful if they were delivered with a certain knowing camp, a grandiloquence that suggested a sense of the ridiculous,” Alex Petridis wrote in the Guardian’s review.
14. The Miracle (1989)
Queen played their final concerts in 1986, but they continued writing and recording fist-pumping arena anthems such as “I Want It All.” The quartet became closer than ever after Mercury’s AIDS diagnosis, and for the first time decided to simply share all songwriting credits equally for The Miracle and subsequent albums. The Miracle boasts one of the all-time most hideous album covers ever released by a major artist, and its accompanying music is better than that, but not by a huge margin. Even at their glossiest, Queen could never make anonymous music, and The Miracle has an entertaining sense of excess only occasionally stifled by the spotless, joyless late ‘80s production.
13. Hot Space (1982)
Few platinum rock bands were better equipped to weather the disco era than Queen. The success of the bassline-driven grooves of “Another One Bites the Dust” and “Under Pressure” certainly made it seem like a smart idea to go all-in on dance pop. In the right hands, a Queen album produced by, say, Georgio Moroder, could’ve been legendary. Hot Space never quite lives up to that potential, with its tinny drum machine beats sounding like a pallid downgrade from the band’s dependable rhythm section. At times resembling a muddled an inert group of unfinished demos, Hot Space was somewhat rescued by including the already released “Under Pressure,” but none of the singles had staying power, and the subsequent tour was the last time Queen played North America. The most atypical song on Hot Space, the gentle falsetto jam “Cool Cat,” belatedly became a streaming hit after appearing in a 2023 Amazon Prime commercial.
12. Made in Heaven (1995)
In the year after Queen completed Innuendo, Mercury knew time was running out, and spent the final months of his life recording vocals for the band to turn into complete songs such as “You Don’t Fool Me” and “A Winter’s Tale” after his death. Made in Heaven was ultimately filled out with outtakes from The Works and The Miracle, as well as Queen versions of a couple songs from Mercury’s only solo album, 1985’s Mr. Bad Guy. Remarkably, Made in Heaven sounds more or less like a conventionally recorded Queen album, but it’s not a great one. Despite the enormous resurgence of American interest in Queen after Mercury’s death and the “Bohemian Rhapsody” scene in Wayne’s World, the gap between Queen’s commercial performance in the U.S. versus the rest of the world actually widened for Made in Heaven: the album peaked at No. 58 on the Billboard 200, but went to No. 1 in the U.K, Germany and several other countries. “These tracks give the band a schmaltzy, ballad-heavy sendoff,” Mike Boehm wrote in the Los Angeles Times review of Made in Heaven.
11. A Kind of Magic (1986)
Six years after Flash Gordon, Queen decided to throw themselves into making the unofficial soundtrack for Highlander, a sci-fi movie that made even less money at the box office. The Christoper Lambert/Sean Connery vehicle has grown into a cult classic over time, but it wasn’t much of a launching pad for Queen’s hardest rocking album of the ‘80s. While the band’s performances are spirited on A Kind of Magic, the songs are hit-and-miss, and Queen sometimes sounds lost in David Richards and Reinhold Mack’s cavernous production. “Who Wants to Live Forever” is poignant outside the context of a film about an immortal trying to avoid being decapitated, while “Don’t Lose Your Head” is… not.
10. The Works (1984)
Queen didn’t entirely retreat from the failed experiments of Hot Space, instead incorporating more drum machines and synths into a return to rock bombast on The Works. The album veers between extremes, from the hard rock strut of “Tear It Up” to the robotic vocoders on “Machines (or ‘Back to Humans’),” a garish but strangely appealing product of its moment. MTV was scared off by the cross dressing in the “I Want To Break Free” video, a key episode in Queen’s steady commercial decline in the U.S. Queen remained larger than life in Europe though, and the worldwide broadcast of their iconic 1985 Live Aid set, with “Radio Ga Ga” and “Hammer to Fall” played alongside their ‘70s hits, at least gave America a taste of the album they’d overlooked.
9. Innuendo (1991)
Mercury did not go quietly into that good night. The last Queen album released during his lifetime is bursting with powerful vocals that don’t sound anything like a man dying of a terminal illness, including the scorching “The Hitman,” the gently poignant “These Are the Days of Our Lives” and the rousing swan song “The Show Must Go On.” Innuendo’s title track is a six-minute swirl of tempo changes recalling Queen’s proggy ‘70s work, and became their first No. 1 on the U.K. Singles Chart in nearly a decade. Perhaps the most disappointing thing about the deeply flawed Bohemian Rhapsody film was its suggestion that Mercury’s story essentially ended at Live Aid – and that his fearless curtain call on Innuendo, one of the defining acts of his life, didn’t need to be in the biopic.
8. Queen (1973)
The sleeve of Queen’s debut album listed each band member and the instruments they played, with the purposeful addendum “…and nobody played synthesizer.” This was often interpreted as a snobby principle the band would subsequently abandon in the Hot Space era, but it was more of a brag: those flashy, futuristic tones you’re hearing on “Keep Yourself Alive”? They’re all coming out of the Red Special, a guitar May built with his father in the early ‘60s. Most of the hallmarks of a Queen album were already fully present in 1973, but with a greater emphasis on dippy fantasy-themed songs such as “My Fairy King” and “Great King Rat.” The debut remains the only Queen album that missed the top 10 on the U.K. album charts, but “Liar” shouldn’t be overlooked as the band’s first maximalist epic.
7. The Game (1980)
The only two Queen songs to top the Hot 100 are both on The Game, and both feature the band playing musical dress-up. Mercury’s goofin’ on Elvis on the sublimely campy rockabilly romp “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” and Deacon hung out in the studio with Chic during the recording of “Good Times” before he composed his own iconic disco bassline for “Another One Bites the Dust.” On the other hand, the songs that represented Queen’s core sound (“Play the Game,” “Save Me”) got a cooler reception, foreshadowing that the band’s imperial era had an expiration date.
6. Queen II (1974)
“Seven Seas of Rhye,” a 76-second instrumental outro on Queen’s debut, also closed the band’s second album, this time as a fully developed song that became their first hit single in the U.K. Queen’s heaviest album is full of songs such as “Ogre Battle” and “The March of the Black Queen,” briefly suggesting that their closest peers were Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull. They might have fostered a smaller but perhaps more loyal fanbase if they’d continued on the path toward metal instead of toying with opera and music hall. “Wimpoid royaloid heavoid android void,” Robert Christgau quipped in the Village Voice.
5. Jazz (1978)
Producer Roy Thomas Baker developed what we know as the ‘70s Queen sound on the band’s first four albums. Baker returned for their seventh LP, Jazz, before setting up shop in America, where he’d just begun producing another string of hits for the Cars. Queen’s commercial prime continued well after Jazz, but the crisp thump of Taylor’s drums would never sound quite as perfect as it did on “Fat Bottomed Girls.” This is the album that best crystallizes Mercury as an irrepressible showman and inexhaustible crowd pleaser, especially on “Let Me Entertain You” and “Don’t Stop Me Now.” Perhaps it’s no coincidence Jazz is also the album that faced the most pronounced pushback from rock critics who found Queen tacky and lacking in substance compared to, say, Bruce Springsteen. “Queen may be the first truly fascist rock band. The whole thing makes me wonder why anyone would indulge these creeps and their polluting ideas,” wrote Dave Marsh in Rolling Stone’s famously splenetic review of Jazz.
4. A Night at the Opera (1975)
“Bohemian Rhapsody” was a tour de force that almost single-handedly changed the trajectory of Queen’s career and still, dozens of hits later, defines its legacy. The song’s parent album, A Night at the Opera, doesn’t actually continue the opera theme, although the eight-minute “The Prophet’s Song” makes a mighty attempt to further up the ante. The more brief pastiches of pre-rock & roll forms such as “Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon” and “Seaside Rendezvous” are just a little too precious for their own good, holding the album back from consistent greatness. “Love of My Life” and “You’re My Best Friend” are two of Queen’s most enduring love songs, but Opera opens with the band’s most hateful rocker: “Death on Two Legs,” penned by Mercury about the Queen’s original manager Normal Sheffield.
3. A Day at the Races (1976)
The follow-up to A Night at the Opera featured similar cover art and another title borrowed from a ‘30s Marx Brothers movie, framing it as a sequel to the band’s breakthrough. While it didn’t have “Bohemian Rhapsody,” A Day at the Races is on the whole superior to its predecessor, with fewer cutesy genre exercises and more quintessential Queen songs such as “You and I” and “Tie Your Mother Down.” Emboldened by the success of his opera excursion, Mercury goes even further in creating dazzling cathedrals of harmonies out of his own multi-tracked voice on “Somebody To Love” and “You Take My Breath Away.” “White Men” and the climax of “The Millionaire Waltz” are just about the only hard rock moments on A Day at the Races, but Queen’s first fully self-produced album is one of their best by just about every other measure.
2. News of the World (1977)
Mercury started cutting his hair shorter in 1977, a turning point in his image that would eventually be completed by the famous mustache. Queen’s songs were becoming more economical and concise at the time, too, though still indulgently florid and ornate compared to the Sex Pistols and the Clash. Instead of adapting to punk’s challenge, Queen embraced pomp and pomposity with the militaristic triumph of “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions.” Taylor may be the least accomplished of Queen’s four songwriters, but he’s a virtuoso talent in his own right, playing nearly all the instruments on News of the World’s “Sheer Heart Attack” and “Fight from the Inside,” and singing the latter.
1. Sheer Heart Attack (1974)
“Killer Queen” finally made them into stars, but Queen so quickly surpassed Sheer Heart Attack commercially that it feels at once like a cult classic in the context of their catalog, a touchstone for hard rock fans and a lynchpin of the band’s live repertoire. “Brighton Rock” features the definitive May guitar solo – three minutes on record but sometimes more than 20 in concert. “Stone Cold Crazy” is fast and heavy enough to lend itself naturally to a Metallica cover, while “She Makes Me (Stormtrooper in Stilettos)” is one of the most fascinating and immersive tone poems in the Queen discography. “Now I’m Here” was only a minor hit in the U.K. and never released as a single in America, but it’s Mercury’s de facto theme music – the song Queen’s original lineup performed more than any other.