Queen release 34-year-old song with Freddie Mercury's vocals: 'We’d kind of forgotten'

Queen are bringing the ’80s into 2022.

The band unveiled the never-before-heard track “Face It Alone” Thursday, which features vocals of late frontman Freddie Mercury. The more than four-minute long song is led by melancholy string plucks and slow drum hits with a sobering self-encouraging message: “Your life is your own / You’re in charge of yourself / Master of your home/ In the end, in the end / You have to face it all alone.”

The song was originally recorded in 1988 while the four-person group was working on their 1989 “The Miracle” album, according to a press release. While working on “Miracle” the band produced 30 tracks but only released 14 on the project that included the hit single “I Want It All.”

Though “Face It Alone” has been in the archives for more than 30 years, it is the first time the band has released new music in eight years and features all four of the band’s original members: Mercury, Brian May, John Deacon and Roger Taylor.

“I’m happy that our team were able to find this track. After all these years, it’s great to hear all four of us … yes, Deacy is there too,” May said in a release.

“We’d kind of forgotten about this track,” Queen drummer Taylor said in the release. “But there it was, this little gem. It’s wonderful, a real discovery. It’s a very passionate piece.”

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ijj_hheGEi0%3Fstart%3D2%26feature%3Doembed

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“Face It Alone” was dusted off as the band was working on a reissue of the “The Miracle” collectors’ box set, out Nov. 18. The eight-disc release will include outtakes, instrumentals, radio interviews and demos of some of the earliest versions of the songs they created during their studio sessions.

The box set will also include six more unreleased songs.

Mercury, who died in 1991 of AIDS complications, has been heard in newly released music before. In 2019 his voice was posthumously brought into speakers with the single “Time Waits For No One,” recorded in 1985.

Singer/producer Dave Clark recruited Mercury to record for the title track of his 1986 sci-fi rock musical, but also had the Queen frontman record a version of the song with simple piano which was released in 2019.

New Freddie Mercury music: Listen to Queen singer’s previously unreleased 1985 track

“(It) gave me goosebumps,” Clark told USA TODAY. “It (became) a mega-production, which I was happy with and Freddie loved. But I didn’t think about what we had originally done until a decade or so later, when I thought, ‘I’ve never felt that sort of goosebumps feeling that I got on that original run-through at Abbey Road with just Freddie and piano.'”

Contributing: Patrick Ryan

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Queen release rediscovered Freddie Mercury vocals on ‘Face It Alone’

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