Queensryche was never the most popular of the 1980s hair-metal bands, but they emerged from the heyday of heavy metal with a prestige many of their contemporaries lost (or never had in the first place), thanks to their political, prog-metal ambitions. In 2006, they issued a mostly well-received follow-up to their 1988 masterwork, Operation: Mindcrime, that, if nothing else, reminded metal fans how powerful the first Mindcrime album was. In 2009, they released a new concept album, American Soldier, which the band wrote after interviewing veterans, but the real curveball came this summer, when the band's dance-inspired Dedicated to Chaos confounded even many of the group's oldest fans.
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