Sheer Heart Attack by Queen
Sheer Heart Attack is the third album by the British rock group Queen, released in November 1974. It was produced by Queen and Roy Thomas Baker and distributed by EMI in the United Kingdom, and Elektra in the United States. The album launched the band to mainstream popularity both in the UK and internationally: the first single, "Killer Queen" reached No. 2 in the British charts and provided Queen with their first US Top 20 hit, peaking at No. 12 on the Billboard singles chart. Sheer Heart Attack was also the first Queen album to hit the US Top 20, peaking at No. 12 in 1975. Digressing from the progressive themes featured on their first two albums, Sheer Heart Attack featured more conventional rock tracks and marked a step towards the classic Queen sound. In recent years, it has been listed by multiple publications as one of the band's best works.
<i>Sheer Heart Attack</i> isn’t just Queen’s breakthrough album; it’s an essential blueprint for a kind of high-drama pop-rock, one still followed by everyone from The Killers to Lady Gaga to Imagine Dragons. And while the band’s peers skewed earthy and rough—think Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath—Queen presented as polished, flamboyant and fastidiously detailed. This was hard rock forged not from the blues, but from opera and musical theatre. As far as a hard-rock acts go, Queen weren’t a bulldozer— they were a ship in a bottle. Prior to <i>Sheer Heart Attack</i>’s release in 1974, Brian May worried that tracks like “Killer Queen” were too light. But the group’s obsessive layering of sounds—the bright bell that comes in around the first minute; May’s brief, feline guitar growl just after the second—became the band’s calling card. And even the heavier tracks on <i>Sheer Heart Attack</i> have a posh, gentlemanly feel (“Stone Cold Crazy”, “Brighton Rock”). If there’s a revolution here, it’s the idea that rock could be powerful without pretending to be natural or raw—that being theatrical was no less authentic than being rugged. Still, in the end, the most important thing was that it all made for a good show, no matter how it all came together. Some bands offered the illusion of coming to you live and direct; Queen’s four members wrung every overdub out of their shiny, 24-track mixing board that they could. The week <i>Sheer Heart Attack</i> came out, an interviewer asked Freddie Mercury if his satin and velvet outfits ever got him attention on the street. Yeah, he said—but he wasn’t about to change into jeans because of it.
