It serves as a companion to Queen's previous album, A Night at the Opera, with both taking their names from Marx Brothers films and having similar packaging and eclectic musical themes.

In 2006, a listener poll conducted by BBC Radio 2 saw A Day at the Races voted the 67th greatest album of all time.

[9] On 25 April 1976, the band settled back in London after a four-leg, six-month, and exhaustive tour of their highly successful album A Night At The Opera, recorded during the oppressive summer of 1975.

On 15 June, Roger Taylor and John Deacon visited Sweet Silence Studios in Denmark.

As August entered, the band worked on the remaining songs of the album, and finished a longer version of "Somebody to Love".

The band eventually cancelled those concerts since the songs they wanted to debut weren't finished, and instead did a mini-tour of the country during September.

[18] The summer tour started in Edinburgh, where "Tie Your Mother Down", and "You Take My Breath Away" were debuted to the audience.

During the summer tour, the band moved production into Sarm East Studios and worked there sporadically in between concerts (in approximately nine sessions) between 5 and 16 September to do overdubs.

[18] Recording sessions resumed on 20 September at Sarm, with more overdubs and rough mixing of some of the finished tracks.

The band then moved to Wessex Sound Studios on 25 October to begin mixing the rest of the album.

A tape of the still unfinished album was created on 5 November, with a different track-list and a lot of chatter and studio noise clearly not mixed out of some songs yet.

[22] He wrote the song on Spanish guitar and thought he'd change the title and chorus later on, but when he brought it to the band for inclusion on this album, Freddie Mercury liked the original and it was kept the way it was written.

A music video was made for the song, directed by Bruce Gowers and based on a performance clip shot at Nassau Coliseum in Long Island, New York, in February 1977 during the band's US arena headlining tour.

He used a Burns Double Six 12-string electric guitar for the rhythm parts, instead of his Red Special; he had wanted to use a Rickenbacker because he admired John Lennon, but did not get along well with the thin neck of the instrument.

[22] Like "Bohemian Rhapsody", it is a multi-key and multi-metre song and features abrupt arrangement changes and May doing multi-tracked guitar choirs.

[22] Mercury's vocal part features a wide range of notes, going from an A♭2 (in the last choral verse) to a falsetto A♭5 (at the peak of his melisma on "ooh" over the choir break).

Staying true to Queen's guitar-driven style, the track was also filled with intricate harmony parts and a solo by May.

The harmonium melody that ends the song is a longer reprise of the second part of the introduction to "Tie Your Mother Down", the first track on the album.

In the UK, the first track from the album to be released as a single was "Somebody to Love", on 12 November 1976 (EMI 2565); it reached number two.

The Washington Post described it as "a judicious blend of heavy metal rockers and classically influenced, almost operatic, torch songs.

"[41] The Winnipeg Free Press was also appreciative, writing: "Races is a reconfirmation of Queen's position as the best of the third wave of English rock groups.

"[42] Circus gave the album a mixed review, writing: "With A Day at the Races, they've deserted art-rock entirely.

[44] In a retrospective review, AllMusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine cited "Tie Your Mother Down" and "Somebody to Love", along with ballad "You Take My Breath Away", as the best tracks on the album, and said the album marked a point where Queen "entered a new phase, where they're globe-conquering titans instead of underdogs on the make".

[32] Q magazine wrote that "the breadth of its ambition remains ever impressive, as do tracks such as May's stomping 'Tie Your Mother Down' and Mercury's baroque one-two, 'Somebody to Love' and 'Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy'.

[4] In 2006, a listener poll conducted by BBC Radio 2 saw A Day at the Races voted the 67th greatest album of all time.

20 of 100 in a poll of "more than 100 actors, comedians, musicians, writers, critics, performance artists, label reps, and DJs, asking each to list the 10 albums that left the most indelible impressions on their lives.

On 8 November 2010, record company Universal Music announced a remastered and expanded reissue of the album set for release in May 2011.