British rockers Queen, American jazz icon Herbie Hancock, and Canadian soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan were honored as recipients of the 2025 Polar Music Prize at Grand Hotel in Stockholm, Sweden tonight. Swedish Idol winner (and former frontman for H.E.A.T. and Skid Row) Erik Grönwall sang "Stone Cold Crazy," Swedish pop singer Miriam Bryant sang "The Show Must Go On," Tobias Forge of Swedish rockers Ghost did "Bohemian Rhapsody" with Opeth guitarist Fredrik Åkesson and the Eric Ericson Chamber Choir, and Queen collaborator Adam Lambert (who is not Swedish) sang Queen's "Who Wants To Live Forever" and "Another One Bites The Dust."
Ghost, who scored their first #1 album in America earlier this month with SKELETÁ, previously covered "Enter Sandman" with Candlemass and Vargas & Lagola to honor Metallica at the 2018 ceremony. Also tonight Esperanza Spalding and Robert Glasper covered Hancock's “Trust Me” and "Watermelon Man," Spalding and Leo Genovese did Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" (which Hancock covered on the Album Of The Year Grammy-winning River: The Joni Letters), and French pianist Bertrand Chamayou performed “Stars” and “Trois Beaux Oiseaux De Paradis” to honor Hannigan.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" was also covered by Benson Boone with Queen guitarist Brian May at Coachella last month. On receiving the Polar Music Prize, May said in a press release, “In this special moment, I contemplate how that younger Brian May in 1974 would have felt if he knew that we would be living this kind of dream 50 years in the future.” "For Queen, Swedish audiences have actually been the most loyally supportive in the world," he said in his acceptance speech.
Drummer Roger Taylor added, “When we started our band…we had ambitions, but never dreamed of the journey that was to follow. We were fortunate in the fact that our four wildly different personalities came together to achieve a wonderful chemistry.
“The Polar Music Prize is exceptional in the fact that unlike other awards it recognizes the entirety of an artiste’s career, he continued. "What an honor to be included in the glittering cavalcade of previous laureates. True Olympian company indeed. We are so proud to be the recipients of this incredibly prestigious award.”
Watch footage from the evening below.
Here are Queen with the King and Queen of Sweden.
