The curtain’s up for Act III, and Queens Of The Stone Age are in a fittingly theatrical mood. After frontman Josh Homme’s brush with death added darker shades of drama and mortal gravitas to their already macabre performance in the Paris Catacombs in 2024, the accompanying live film and documentary was celebrated with a stripped-back tour with Vaudeville vibes. Upping their showmanship and teetering on their more esoteric edges rather than the razor-sharp riffs and mosh-pit fuel you know them for, it was QOTSA taking a slow, deep breath. They’re still coming up for air on ninth album ‘Perfecth’ and its nine songs are “trying to stitch together all these emotions revolving around love, lust, foolishness, and the sort of wisdom that comes as a gift from all that”, as Homme puts it.
You can almost feel opener ‘It’s Only Love’ slowly blowing down those same empty corridors lined with skulls beneath the French capital. It’s a woozy and orchestral death waltz around the funeral pyre of devotion, “this twist of hope I’m hanging on”. Settling into the simmering horizontal groove of ‘Insignificant Other’ – a more feeling and less sleazy sonic sequel to ‘Make It Wit Chu’ that sees Homme admit “letting go is beautiful” of an ex lost to “psychobabble, birth charts and spells” – you know this isn’t gonna be your standard rock festival fare.
QOTSA’s sideways approach, born of being ‘baked until weird’ in the desert sun, is turned up the Nth degree on ‘Perfecth’, with the same freewheelin’ spirit of collab albums ‘The Desert Sessions’ while plunging further into the emotional depths of ‘…Like Clockwork’. ‘Where The Goth Girls At?’ is a swampy and camp stomper that constantly keeps you guessing, atmospheric album highlight ‘Mono’ feels like the spaced-out, weirder cousin of ‘Kalopsia’, and ‘From The Cliff’ is a finger-pickin’ good lullaby as Homme intimately gives himself fully to “a leap of faith from the cliff of love into the blue”.
The closest thing to a ‘banger’ comes through either ‘Easy Street’ with its flamenco wash, handclaps and “Heroes” guitar wails as Homme twirls away from a wayward life of hard knocks and hedonism for sunnier climbs (“I’m not like that anymore”, he promises, “been dead a long time”) or the echoes of the Thin White Duke on ‘Sunday’. Following in the lineage of ‘China Girl’ being bounced between Iggy Pop and Bowie, Homme returns to borrow a song he penned for the stellar Iggy collab album ‘Post Pop Depression’, keeping its punk peacock strut but injecting it with a little more QOTSA desert soul and grit.
The soul of the late, great Mark Lanegan flows through the acoustic grunge of ‘Phantom Limb’, as Homme pleas for help in the presence of absence, before ‘Run Away From The Mob’ closes with the singer looking for a little devotion in a world of blood-thirsty “morons” and trial by internet. This is as open-hearted as Homme has been since the band’s mid-career rebirth on ‘…Like Clockwork’. Carrying that sense of fracture that comes from heartache and from having recorded the album piecemeal in studios around the world, ‘Perfecth’ is held together by a thread of classic American songwriting and a subtle touch of musical theatre.
Homme has described this era as the band’s third act, looking for some peace after a first phase of securing themselves as pioneers outside of the usual rock mold and the second of upping the ante and going to war. Like life and love, the album is knowingly not perfect, but nothing is. You’d rather drift off a little less and be anchored down by a little more bite and brimstone, but what you’ve got is a record with open arms and an open mind to the last stretch of road ahead.
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