Taking on each album individually allows for an in-depth analysis of the evolution of the Queen sound in conjunction with their immediately identifiable visual identity. With Queen: Album by Album, rock journalist Martin Popoff seeks to set the record straight on the band’s musical legacy. Often lost in all the flamboyant theatricality of Mercury’s stage presence is the fact that, together, the band produced a surprisingly solid body of work that, more than 40 years later, still sounds both contemporary and timeless. With the recent release of the Rami Malek-starring biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen has once again popped back into the cultural zeitgeist, something that seems to transpire once a decade or so. Never truly belonging to any one particular scene or trend, it built a legacy on the soaring vocals of Freddie Mercury, the precise guitar of Brian May and the rock-solid rhythm section of John Deacon and Roger Taylor to create a sound and visual aesthetic all their own. Queen has long been a band that existed in its own idiosyncratic world.