{"id":379206,"date":"2025-08-28T02:37:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-28T02:37:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/379206\/"},"modified":"2025-08-28T02:37:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-28T02:37:10","slug":"the-album-josh-homme-called-a-mistake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/379206\/","title":{"rendered":"The album Josh Homme called a “mistake”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Josh<\/p>\n

(Credits: Raph Pour-Hashemi)<\/p>\n

Thu 28 August 2025 0:00, UK <\/p>\n

Queens of the Stone Age<\/a> are perhaps one of the most consistent rock groups of the modern era, and the strength of their early albums alone is enough to carry them through their career.<\/p>\n

After the demise of Kyuss, Josh Homme<\/a> sought to take his old band\u2019s stoner rock sound in a more commercially viable direction, beefing up the sound with hooks that were designed to draw in bigger crowds. While Kyuss had only drawn in an audience within a more niche environment, Queens of the Stone Age immediately seemed destined for bigger things, and that was due to Homme\u2019s incorporation of more classic rock elements into the sludgier aspects of what he\u2019d been creating in the early 1990s.<\/p>\n

With their second and third albums, Rated R and Songs for the Deaf, they managed to skyrocket their way to becoming one of the most formidable bands in hard rock, and while the follow-up, Lullabies to Paralyze wasn\u2019t a terrible record, it didn\u2019t land with audiences in quite the same way. Perhaps they\u2019d taken things as far as they could logically go at this point, and were desperately searching for a way to revitalise the energy and urgency that had existed in their music on their earlier records.<\/p>\n

Even more shockingly, 2007\u2019s Era Vulgaris<\/a> performed worse than its predecessor, so when they took a little bit of a break from releasing following the drab reception of their fifth record, it became more and more apparent that the next album was going to be make or break. They found themselves in a situation where they could potentially lose everything they\u2019d worked so hard to establish themselves with, and their stock as one of the great modern rock groups could vanish if their sixth record didn\u2019t hark back to the highs of their earlier successes.<\/p>\n

Homme knew that this was the case, and felt nervous that they wouldn\u2019t be able to strengthen their position with the record they\u2019d taken six years to write after Era Vulgaris, so much so that he apologised to his bandmates about the record when the finishing touches were being applied. He recognised that things had been moving in the wrong direction over the course of the last two albums, and \u2026Like Clockwork needed to rectify that.<\/p>\n

Speaking to Dean Delray on the Let There Be Talk podcast, Homme reflected on the concerns that he had when \u2026Like Clockwork was being completed, and despite noting that the dark record was \u201cthe one that I think most accurately represents us and myself,\u201d he hadn\u2019t always believed in it as a potential success. \u201cI remember saying to the guys that I was so convinced that it was a mistake,\u201d he confessed to Delray. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t going to change anything, that I just want to say before it comes out, I\u2019m really sorry and if we end up having to just headline the Troubadour again, you won\u2019t see me anymore. So I kind of apologised to the band.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, it ended up rejuvenating the band\u2019s career, and went on to be one of their most successful records, and while it didn\u2019t necessarily match their early records in terms of style, it showcased that an evolution of the band was possible while still retaining all of the melodic and gripping elements that had made them such an exciting prospect in the first place.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Raph Pour-Hashemi) Thu 28 August 2025 0:00, UK Queens of the Stone Age are perhaps one of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":379207,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3936],"tags":[77,53251,269,53252,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-379206","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-josh-homme","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-queens-of-the-stone-age","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115104071693106405","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379206\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}