QUEEN II: Queen’s majestic second album, Queen II (1974), remixed, remastered and expanded in a lavish 5CD+2LP box Queen II Collector’s Edition for release on March 27th
Also released as 2xCD Deluxe Edition, Vinyl LP, Vinyl Picture Disc LP, 1xCD and cassette formats, all featuring a brand new 2026 mix
Click here to Pre-Order Queen II
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“On Queen II, it was the first time we were allowed a certain amount of freedom in the studio. Whereas with the first album, we weren’t. And so basically it sounds better, and it sounded more like we wanted it to sound. I don’t think all of it is perfect by a long way, but, in general, it had more, and we were sort of building our confidence in the studio. Some would say overconfidence, but, you know,” – Roger Taylor
“I’ve always been a big advocate of Queen II because I think that was a giant step. We’re going from a band that is hardly allowed in the studio, except for a few kind of hours in dead time, to a band that actually has studio time. We can indulge ourselves. We can experiment, and we do make a giant leap with painting pictures on the canvas of the tapes on Queen II. I love that album. Still. Queen II wasn’t that well-received in the rock fraternity in some places.” – Brian May
“We were a tight little family. It’s the four of us, Mike Stone, the engineer, Roy Baker, our producer. And we’re all transitioning. We’re all learning how to use the studio as a sort of family unit. I don’t know why I say family, but it felt like that; we all had our particular roles to play and understood what we could do. Pushing things ever further.”
“Gotta say, it was quite exhilarating. Very much so with Freddie, because he was such a powerful creative force. But actually, for any song which we took on, no matter who amongst the four of us had brought it in, it was an exhilarating process. Challenging, sometimes difficult, sometimes argumentative. But really rewarding because what you got in the end was something so shiny and rounded, and
adventurous, dangerous.”
“But it had the seal of approval. Approval of all four of us and the input of all four of us. And it became Queen stuff, and Queen stuff was a million times greater than anything which any one of the four of us could come up on their own, and we had to get used to that.” – Brian May
“Our sound is more based around the overdriven guitar, which is used on the main bulk of Father To Son. What I wanted to do was build up textures behind the main melody lines.” – Brian May
:On Queen II there is a lot of stuff which I like because that was the beginning of doing guitar orchestrations, which I always wanted to do. Father To Son starts off with an introduction, and then, after it gets into the song and a few words are sung, it immediately goes into a six-part orchestral kind of thing. It was really a big thrill for me to be able to do that, because I had never been allowed to spend that amount of time in the studio to construct those things before then. That was the fulfilment of an ambition for me, to get started on that road of using the guitar as kind of an orchestral instrument.” – Brian May
“Queen II really represented all the stuff that was bubbling in our brain at the time, and it was a much better presentation of the way we wanted to sound. It threw some people. I remember when the reviews came out, they said, these guys have forgotten rock n roll, but it was just a different format we were trying to get into, something more complex, more layered than anyone else had been able to do. I felt very proud of Queen II when we first put it out” – Brian May
Photo: Johnny Dewe Mathews