Get ready to hear Queen’s self-titled debut album in a whole new way. The classic rock legends’ 1973 LP, now retitled Queen I, has been significantly revamped for a new box set coming Oct. 25, which also features extensive bonus material. The 6CD 1LP set contains 63 tracks, including 43 brand new mixes.
Guitarist Brian May describes Queen I as “a brand new 2024 rebuild of the entire Queen debut album.” Audio engineers Justin Shirley-Smith, Joshua J Macrae, and Kris Fredriksson have remixed and restored the original recordings using modern techniques and equipment to revitalize the sound of the album. “All the performances are exactly as they originally appeared in 1973, but every instrument has been revisited to produce the ‘live’ ambient sounds we would have liked to use originally,” May explains. “The result is Queen as it would have sounded with today’s knowledge and technology – a first.”
Queen was originally recorded in mostly overnight sessions at London’s Trident Studios. “We’d arrive at three in the morning and then go on, for all the hours that we could grab,” explains drummer Roger Taylor. At Trident, band members clashed with studio staff on multiple fronts. For one, Queen were forced to use the studio’s in-house drum kit in a sound booth rather than their own drums out in the main room “They had this very dead drum sound, and it was never the sound we wanted,” Taylor says.
In addition to the new stereo mix and remaster, Queen I boasts a new tracklist, with “Mad The Swine” reinserted as the album’s fourth song. It was originally removed from the album due to another dispute between Queen and a producer.
Beyond the main album, the Queen I box set contains a wealth of bonus material. CD2 includes the De Lane Lea Demos, recordings of “Keep Yourself Alive,” “The Night Comes Down,” “Jesus,” “Liar,” and “Great King Rat” tracked in preparation for the proper recording sessions. CD3 has alternate takes from Trident, while CD4 features the Queen I instrumental backing tracks minus vocals, spotlighting the band’s brilliant interplay behind superstar frontman Freddie Mercury.
CD5 comprises BBC radio sessions from the era, including a performance on John Peel’s Sounds Of The Seventies that marked the first ever broadcast of Queen’s music. CD6 wraps things up with live recordings from Queen’s March 1974 concert at London’s Rainbow Theatre with a handful of previously unreleased live tracks from other gigs mixed in. The disc concludes with the earliest recordings of Queen from their very first show on Aug. 23, 1970 at Imperial College, “Jesus” and a cover of the Spencer Davis Group’s “I’m A Man.”
Queen I is rounded out by a vinyl edition of the revamped album plus a 108-page book featuring handwritten lyrics and memorabilia. In addition to physical and digital editions of the full box set, various condensed versions of Queen I will be available on CD, LP, picture disc, and cassette. A 7” single featuring the 2024 mix of “The Night Comes Down” will be released Oct. 4 in advance of the box set, and those who purchase the digital version of the Queen I box will receive “The Night Comes Down” immediately.
