Queen II | Sheer Heart Attack | A Night at the Opera | A Day at the Races | News of the World | Jazz
The Game | Hot Space | The Works | A Kind of Magic | The Miracle | Innuendo
- Ensemble Dark Horse: The album has become quite popular among fans of the band, particularly those inclined toward Progressive Rock. It's not uncommon these days to find people citing this as Queen's best album.
- Older Than They Think: The Bohemian Parody trope references this album (released in 1974), the cover of which would be reused for the song "Bohemian Rhapsody" (released in 1975 on A Night at the Opera, two albums after this one - Sheer Heart Attack separated them). For that matter, the musical style of "Bohemian Rhapsody" itself was already fully in flower here - while "Bohemian Rhapsody" is arguably more focused, it practically sounds like a sequel to the album's lengthy suites, and to "The March of the Black Queen" in particular.
- Vindicated by History: Brian May has said that, in retrospect, he thinks that this was probably the strongest album the band ever recorded. Similarly, some critics have reconsidered the first album and judged it to be a perfectly good hard rock debut. Interestingly, Progressive Rock fans seem to share May's opinion on Queen II. You would probably expect A Night at the Opera to have the highest rating of any of their studio albums on Prog Archives, since it's almost universally regarded as a masterpiece and has several of the genre's signature songs, but Queen II is actually rated even higher (4.37/5 for Queen II as opposed to 4.27/5 for Opera at the time of this writing).
