(Credits: Far Out / Carl Lender)
Thu 19 March 2026 9:13, UK
The reality is, you will rarely be happy with the work you first made years after you made it. You don’t have to be a globe-trotting band like Queen to know that. Just take a quick look into your old sketchbooks, notepads or even school work and find yourself enduring an unbearable level of cirnginess.
Every band usually needs time to work out the bugs before settling on a particular sound. Outside of a few exceptions, anyone who has ever tried to make it in the music industry either spends their first record trying to figure out what the hell they want to sound like or ends up making something more than a little bit embarrassing so they can get their musical sea legs.
Although Queen came to the world fully formed on their debut record, Brian May still thinks that listening to the album these days is a little bit rough on the ears. And that’s a natural evolution for most performers and musicians.
Compared to their contemporaries, though, Queen had the sheer force behind their music down to a tee on their debut. While ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ was as straight-ahead as they would ever get, the power behind the guitars and especially the vocal harmonies were evident immediately, almost like they were trying to create a rock and roll choir with their voices.
There are even a few traces of where they would go later on the album as well. Ballads like ‘Doing All Right’ and ‘The Night Comes Down’ were the first look at their softer side, and while a track like ‘Great King Rat’ was a bit much for people to take in all at once, a song of that size and scope was enough to plant the seeds for what ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ work go on to do a few albums later.
While the band could cover a lot of bases, May thought that they were a master of none of them quite yet, telling Guitar World, saying, “Our major frustration was the sound of that first album, which we were never happy with. We were thrown into the studio and into a system which regarded itself as state of the art…[but] they’d all be dead and down. I remember saying to Roy Thomas Baker, ‘This isn’t really the sound we want, Roy.’ And he said, ‘Don’t worry, we can fix it all in the mix.’ Which, of course, is not the best way, is it?”
If this is what the rough-and-tumble Queen sounds like, though, it’s hardly a downgrade by most other rock band standards. There are a handful of ramshackle moments like Roger Taylor’s ‘Modern Times Rock and Roll’, but other spotty moments like the instrumental version of ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’ almost serve as a teaser for what they would do just one album later.
And it’s not like May didn’t already have his chops down. From the moment ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ starts, he has already developed an incredible sense of harmony, almost turning his entire guitar into a symphony during the solo section by overdubbing various harmony lines during the last few bars.
Whereas Queen was a decent way of showing the group at their best, Queen II was probably more indicative of what the group was going for. Suddenly, the vocals sounded far more pronounced, the guitars were punchier, and the songs gave fans their first look at the musical giant they were becoming on tracks like ‘Father to Son’ and ‘Ogre Battle’.
Queen may have been tied down due to the circumstances of the group’s beginnings, but you’d hardly notice it when listening to it. If anything, this was proof that even as a rough-around-the-edges rock and roll outfit, Queen were a rare breed that could take their songs in any direction they saw fit.
It might be that almost every single artist feels strange about their debut records. Even Nirvana, Arctic Monkeys, The Beatles and more would, by the latter stages of their career, look back at their first release and wince. Brian May is no different.
