(Credits: Raph Pour-Hashemi)
Wed 13 August 2025 1:00, UK
Queens of the Stone Age aren’t an albums band. Josh Homme and whichever crew of stoner-rock tough nuts he can assemble that week are one of the great singles bands of their time, and one of the great live bands of the 21st century.
All that quality doesn’t often translate into the studio, where their tendency to noodle over half-baked riffs and half-formed song ideas can make the mind wander away from the sheer magic of songs like ‘First It Giveth’, ‘No One Knows’ and ‘Burn the Witch’.
This may be my taste speaking, but at the same time, I don’t really think that Homme built Queens of the Stone Age for being an albums kind of band. A lot of the time, it doesn’t seem like he built them for anything other than proving his own reputation as one of the coolest people Palm Springs, California, ever produced. Not bad for a part of town that gave the world both Lucille Ball and Katherine Hepburn. If anything, sweating over the minutiae of a song’s bridge would go against the very soul of the band itself.
That’s not me patronising the band either; they’re a group for whom the very point of rock ‘n’ roll is spontaneity. That overthinking is the very death of rock ‘n’ roll, and there’s a very good argument to be made there. Raw Power wasn’t made by The Stooges sweating over each individual scrap of a song; it was made by figuring out during their live shows what made crowds go absolutely insane (that wasn’t Iggy trying to kill himself) and somehow getting that into the studio.
Thus, Queens of the Stone Age albums are often built in a similar way. Why sweat the small stuff when you could make a record with vibes alone? Their ascension to arena-slaying heights and festival headline slots proves that the whole idea works, so why am I being such a buzz kill? Well, apart from the fact that I’m a rock writer, and killing buzzes is what we were put on this cursed earth to do, it’s because there’s one iron-clad example of just what kind of album Homme is capable of when he puts his mind to it.
Josh Homme (Credits: Raph Pour-Hashemi)What is the album that made Josh Homme a better person?
Anyone familiar with the story of Josh Homme knows that in 2010, he died. At the time, it was reported that for a few minutes, he died on the table during a surgical procedure on his leg. Turned out that it was actually an MRSA infection that he was under the knife for because his drug-addled nervous system couldn’t fight it on its own. He asphyxiated on the table and was clinically dead for a few minutes before being revived by a defibrillator.
I don’t want to blow your mind too much, but that’s the kind of experience that changes a person. He was bedridden for the next few months and essentially had to learn how to move again afterwards. During this time, he understandably developed a deep and profound depression. An experience that he turned into the 2013 masterpiece …Like Clockwork. This is the sole good Queens of the Stone Age album, and it’s one of the best rock albums of the 21st century.
Homme said the undercurrent of the record is just being honest, “and if something is scary, walk toward it, not away from it. There’s no other way I could have said any of what it says. I just want it to feel real. I think, ‘if I do this from a real spot then [we] could be someone’s favourite band in the whole world’. And, ideally, these records, if you do ’em right, make you a little better as a person.”
Obviously, we can’t say whether it made Josh Homme better as a person, as we don’t know him personally. However, Queens of the Stone Age definitely made the step up to being one of the biggest bands of their generation due to it. So it definitely made them a better band.
This isn’t to say that one can only make great art when they’ve suffered, but that great art takes time and attention. It may not be rock ‘n’ roll, but sometimes that’s what makes it great.
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