Well, being a HUGE Queen fan, I have all their albums, and I tend to like the way you think on them. A Night at the Opera is my favorite Queen album and one of my all time favorite albums altogether. I would say that Sheer Heart Attack rocks about the hardest of all Queen albums, so I’m guessing you’re into the really full sound that comes off very hard. One interesting thing you seem to have done is between Sheer Heart Attack (their 3rd album) and A Night At The Opera (their 4th album), you then jumped to their 6th album (News of the World) and 7th Album (Jazz). I would recommend first thing you want to do is get their 5th album A Day at the Races. It starts off with an absolute classic “Tie Your Mother Down”, and contains the mega hit “Somebody to Love”. It seems texturally a lot more like A Night at the Opera than Sheer Heart Attack, but I like the way the album flows between styles (which is much of the reason I like Night). I would probably then go ahead and move backwards and backfill with Queen and Queen II, because it really shows the beginings of the band and what really led them to get to Sheer Heart Attack and Night at the Opera. Then I’d recommend The Game, which was their next studio album after Jazz, and contained hits like Another One Bites the Dust and Crazy Little Thing Called Love (I’d say this was probably their most “commercial” album). At that point, you’ll have their first 9 albums down, which is pretty much the document of who they were when they were huge.
After that, honestly, I’d almost rank their albums in reverse order, starting with the last album they released while Freddy was still alive, 1991’s Innuendo…which I thought was their best album since News of the World, heck, probably since Night at the Opera to be honest. 1989’s The Miracle was almost as good as Innuendo, 1986’s A Kind of Magic was almost as good as The Miracle, and 1984’s The Works was almost as good as A Kind of Magic.
In between these two distinct periods where Queen was extremely good (1971 – 1980) and when they were pretty good but not what they used to be (1984 – 1991) they had couple of albums I’d recommend only to die hards, 1980’s Flash Gordon Soundtrack and 1982’s Hot Space (notable only for the duet with David Bowie “Under Pressure”, otherwise a throwaway almost disco album).
And of course, you can’t go wrong with their live albums, 1979’s Live Killers and Live at Wembley ‘86 (which was released as Live Magic back in ‘86 and re-released under this title in the 90s) are both outstanding documents of their live shows. There really is no point in buying the 3 Greatest Hits albums or Queen Rocks if you have the studio albums, though they did put out a posthumous release “Made in Heaven”, which honestly did nothing for me. And as for their new work with Paul Rodgers, I do not consider that to be “Queen”. You’re better off looking into Brian May’s post Queen solo albums. There is one other title if you really get into them, called At the BBC which is mostly live recordings from the BBC studios of songs that appeared on their first 2 albums…kind of interesting to the uberfan, not much to the casual observer.
To summarize, buy in this order from this point:
1. A Day At The Races
2. Queen
3. Queen 2
4. The Game
5. Innuendo
6. The Miracle
7. A Kind of Magic
8. The Works
9. Live at Wembley ‘86
10. Hot Space
11. Live Killers
12. Flash Gordon
13. At the BBC
14. Made In Heaven
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Composing members:
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