“Anyone with an alternate viewpoint is liable to get burned at the stake”: Queensryche made an 80s metal classic with Operation: Mindcrime. Nearly 20 years later, they tried to match it with a sequel

A line-up photograph of Queensryche in 2006.

Released in 1988, Queensyche’s third album, Operation: Mindcrime, was a conceptual, state-of-the-art metal masterpiece. Nineteen years later, they revisited the characters from the first album with the sequel, Operation: Mindcrime II. In 2006, singer Geoff Tate – who acrimoniously left the band in 2012 – talked Classic Rock through its creation and why the storyline was as politically resonant as it had been almost 20 years earlier.

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