Jazz by Queen

Jazz, Queen's seventh studio album, rolled out on 10 November 1978 on EMI in Britain and Elektra in the States, with Roy Thomas Baker back as co-producer. It is, as ever with these four, everything at once: hard rock, heavy metal crunch, arena bombast and pure pop, stacked sky-high by Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon.

"Fat Bottomed Girls" struts like a stadium full of stomping boots, "Bicycle Race" careens along on its own lunatic momentum, and "Don't Stop Me Now" is Mercury at full gallop, a joyride with the brakes cut. Taylor came up with the cover idea after spotting a similar design painted on the Berlin Wall. The critics couldn't decide whether all that stylistic hopscotch was a triumph or a mess, but it still made number two in the UK and number six in the US.

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