The Works by Queen

The Works, Queen's eleventh studio album, came out on EMI in February 1984, their first on Capitol in the US, and after the synth-heavy Hot Space it brought the guitars back. Queen produced it themselves at the Record Plant in Los Angeles and Musicland in Munich between August 1983 and January 1984, and the title came from Roger Taylor's call, as the sessions began, to give the fans everything.

That's what they got: May and Taylor's hard rock punching back through, Freddie Mercury's taste for retro-futurist electronics and John Deacon's fascination with New York funk, from the stomp of "Hammer to Fall" to the synth pulse of "Radio Ga Ga" and the bouncy "I Want to Break Free". That last song's video didn't go down well in America, and the band stayed off North American stages, but Europe more than made up for it. It spent 94 weeks on the UK chart, longer than any other Queen studio album, and sold more than six million copies worldwide.

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