Queen have shared a new take on their debut album, Queen I, with a Dolby Atmos edition released on Audiophile Blu-ray.
“This is not just a remaster, this is a brand new 2024 rebuild of the entire Queen debut album,” explained Brian May when announcing the release of the band’s revisit of their eponymous debut album late last year. May further elaborated: “Every instrument has been revisited to produce the ‘live’ ambient sound we would have liked to use originally.”
With Brian May and Roger Taylor acting as executive producers, and overseen by Queen’s long-standing audio-production team of Justin Shirley-Smith, Joshua J Macrae and Kris Fredriksson, this enhanced spatial surround sound format release breathes stunning new life into the band’s epic and unique multi-layered sound.
Says Justin Shirley-Smith: “It always feels like Queen’s music was designed for immersive formats. It’s dramatic and powerful and has a lot of dynamics. The original album was recorded more than 50 years ago, but it was so ambitious musically, rhythmically and lyrically. It’s beyond belief really, and it’s such a joy for us to work on.”
To mix Queen I in Dolby Atmos, the team made stems from the 2024 stereo mix, allowing them to process and pan each musical part individually, bringing new depth and dimensions to an album already bursting with invention.
Originally released in 1973 and featuring the iconic line-up of Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon, Queen’s self-titled debut album marked the start of the band’s journey, showcasing a band whose staggering musical talents and breadth of ambition remain unmatched.
In further exciting news, the band has also shared a lyric video for the iconic “My Fairy King.” Regarding the track, Shirley-Smith said: “…the song ‘My Fairy King’ is a precursor to what came later with ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’ It’s so adventurous, and this new mix brings out things that you won’t have heard before. Like everything on the album, it sounds fantastic.”
For the song, Freddie Mercury took inspiration from Robert Browning’s poem “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” even repurposing some of the phrasings from the 1842 story. The opening verse of the song, in which Mercury sings, “In the land where horses born with eagle wings/ And honey bees have lost their stings/ There’s singing forever/ Lion’s den with fallow deer,” has been compared to Browning’s poem, which reads: “The sparrows were brighter than peacocks here/ And their dogs outran our fallow deer/ And honey-bees had lost their stings/ And horses were born with eagles’ wings.”
Order Queen I in Dolby Atmos now.
