A Night at the Opera by Queen

A Night at the Opera, Queen's fourth album, came out in 1975 on EMI in Britain and Elektra in America, and it's a record that goes all in on excess. Named after the Marx Brothers film, it reportedly cost more than any record made before it, produced by Roy Thomas Baker and the band over four months in 1975 at a string of studios, including Basing Street. They'd been bled dry by management problems, earning almost nothing from their earlier records, so they walked away from Trident and went for broke.

The ambition is dizzying. Layer upon layer of multitrack recording turns guitars into orchestras and voices into choirs, and the band jumps from hard rock and progressive epics to ballads, music-hall pastiche, sea shanties and dixieland, digging out a double bass, a harp and a ukulele along the way. "You're My Best Friend" is sunny and bouncy, "I'm in Love With My Car" is a greasy, revving rocker, and "39" is a folky singalong shanty. And then there's "Bohemian Rhapsody", a ballad, opera and hard-rock stampede crammed into one song, twice as long as the average single of the day, which somehow became a worldwide hit and Queen's first number one in the UK.

The album became their first number-one album at home, topping the chart for four non-consecutive weeks, reached number four in the US and went platinum there. Critics loved the production and the range, and it made Queen worldwide superstars. It's now hailed as their best album and went into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2018.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.