Queen release previously unheard song with Freddie Mercury on vocals

British rock band Queen have released a previously unheard song recorded in 1988 when the group’s lead singer, Freddie Mercury, was still alive. The recording, Face It Alone, was destined to join hits including I Want It All on the 1989 album Miracle. On November 18, Queen are due to release a reissue of their 13th album, the penultimate LP the band released before Mercury’s death in 1991, entitled The Miracle – Expanded Collector’s Edition, which will feature six more unreleased songs and The Miracle Sessions, several recordings the group made in the studio during the creative process for Miracle between 1987 and 1989.

Face It Alone will be the first song Queen has released featuring Mercury’s voice since 2014′s Queen Forever, a three-song EP consisting of the Mercury-sung Let Me In Your Heart Again, Love Kills and There Must Be More To Life Than This. The band’s lead guitarist, Brian May, and bassist Roger Taylor revealed the existence of Face It Alone during an interview with the BBC following a concert to mark the Jubilee celebrations of Queen Elizabeth II last June. “We did find a little gem from Freddie, that we’d kind of forgotten about,” Taylor said. Face It Alone was one of almost 30 tracks recorded during sessions for The Miracle. After reaching the decision to issue a reedit of the album, the remaining members of the band listened back through some of the songs that did not make the final cut for the original 10-song LP, which was extended to 13 tracks upon its release on CD.

Face It Alone, which reached 300,000 views on YouTube just five hours after being released, opens with a guitar pluck and maintains a melancholy tone throughout its four minutes. By the time the band recorded the track, Mercury had been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. May describes the song as “very beautiful and moving.”

In a release statement, the members of Queen explained what a difficult process recovering all the fragments of the recording of Face It Alone had been. “We went round and round in circles and thought we couldn’t rescue it. But in the end, with persistence, our team of sound engineers did it. It was like putting the pieces of a puzzle together and it turned out beautifully,” May said of the process.

The Miracle was one of Queen’s most commercially successful albums, reaching the number one spot in several European countries and being certified gold in the US. The reissue of the album, which features May’s favorite Queen song, the eponymous title track, is in the form of an eight-disc box set.