Queen Classic

Essentially, this 17-track album is a second-volume Queen's Greatest Hits, picking up the story from that album's 1981 release and taking it to the end of Queen's career. But the album also contains a few tracks – "Bohemian Rhapsody," "Keep Yourself Alive," and "Under Pressure" – that appeared on that first set, as well as a couple – "Stone Cold Crazy" and "Tie Your Mother Down" – from the same era…

Essentially, this 17-track album is a second-volume Queen's Greatest Hits, picking up the story from that album's 1981 release and taking it to the end of Queen's career. But the album also contains a few tracks - "Bohemian Rhapsody," "Keep Yourself Alive," and "Under Pressure" - that appeared on that first set, as well as a couple - "Stone Cold Crazy" and "Tie Your Mother Down" - from the same era. The remaining 12 tracks, culled from The Works, A Kind of Magic, The Miracle, and Innuendo, represent songs that were not big hits in the U.S. Nevertheless, with a resurgence of interest in Queen and the second coming of "Bohemian Rhapsody," courtesy of Wayne's World, this album returned Queen to platinum status and the U.S. Top Five for the first time since the early '80s.

If Day at the Races was a sleek, streamlined album, its 1977 successor, News of the World, was its polar opposite, an explosion of styles that didn't seem to hold to any particular center. It's front-loaded with two of Queen's biggest anthems – the stomping, stadium-filling chant "We Will Rock You" and its triumphant companion, "We Are the Champions" – which are quickly followed by the ferocious "Sheer Heart Attack," a frenzied rocker that hits harder than anything on the album that shares its name (a remarkable achievement in itself). Three songs, three quick shifts in mood, but that's hardly the end of it.