Queen will unveil a previously unreleased song featuring Freddie Mercury titled “Face It Alone” on Thursday.
The band has been teasing the release with a series of billboards around the world that say “Queen – Face It Alone” and include a picture Mercury and a QR code. The signs first appeared in London and have since been spotted in Canada, Mexico, Japan and more.
“Queen Fans! Have you seen the news? Keep your eyes peeled & share your photos of where you’ve seen our Billboards using #FaceItAlone,” Queen tweeted on Friday.
The band also shared a 15-second preview of the song, which features Mercury singing, “In the end, in the end, you have to face it alone.”
Guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor announced over the summer that “Face It Alone” would arrive in September. The track dates back to sessions for the band’s 1989 album The Miracle.
“We did find a little gem from Freddie, that we’d kind of forgotten about,” Taylor told BBC Radio 2 (via Stereogum). “And it was. It’s wonderful. Actually, it was a real discovery.”
May originally thought the recording was unsalvageable, but engineers proved him wrong. “It was kind of hiding in plain sight,” he said. “We looked at it many times and thought, ‘Oh, no, we can’t really rescue that.’ But in fact, we went in there again and our wonderful engineering team went, ‘OK, we can do this and this.’ It’s like kind of stitching bits together … but it’s beautiful, It’s touching.”
The last new Queen music featuring Mercury came out eight years ago, when May and Taylor included the Michael Jackson duet “There Must Be More to Life Than This” on the 2014 Queen Forever compilation. In 2019, a stripped-down version of Mercury’s 1986 solo single “Time” was also released under the title “Time Waits for No One.”
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