Queen

Four players who should not have cohered as neatly as they did. A singer trained partly in art and design, a guitarist who built his own instrument with his father, a drummer who also wrote and sang, a bassist with a physics background. On paper that is a collision. On record it became a band that could move from heavy rock to close vocal harmony inside a single track and make the seam invisible.

Their signature was excess used precisely. Layered voices stacked into something that sounds like a far larger ensemble. Guitar made to behave like instruments it is not. A studio treated less as a room to capture a performance and more as an instrument in its own right. When it worked, and it worked often, the size never felt like showing off. It felt structural.

The catalog around their best-known songs is wider and odder than the radio staples suggest. They wrote pastiche and they wrote sincerity, sometimes in the same four minutes, and rarely told you which was which. That refusal to settle into one mode is the through-line.

A Night at the Opera, released in 1975, is where the ambition stopped being a tendency and became the whole point.