Queens of the Stone Age have spent three decades making the crooked, strange and occasionally sleazy sound irresistible. Now Josh Homme and company are heading somewhere new again with ninth studio album ‘Perfecth’, arriving October 30 via Matador Records and Remote Control Records.
The announcement comes with ‘Insignificant Other’, the second taste of the album following ‘Easy Street’, featuring Nikki Lane. Recorded in only two takes, the new track captures Queens playing loose rather than chasing studio perfection, leaving space for the five members to react to each other as the song unfolds.
At its heart is distance and the disorientation that follows when somebody who once occupied an enormous part of your life suddenly disappears. It is an idea that feeds directly into the wider concerns of ‘Perfecth’, an album that circles different forms of love and what remains after those relationships change, fracture or disappear.
Homme produced ‘Perfecth’ alongside bassist Michael Shuman, with Troy Van Leeuwen, Dean Fertita and Jon Theodore completing the current Queens lineup. Sessions took place across multiple locations including New Orleans and Los Angeles, producing nine songs that deliberately resist settling into a single mood.
The Japanese art of kintsugi provides one of the album’s central ideas. Rather than disguisging the cracks in broken pottery, kintsugi repairs them with gold and makes the damage part of the object’s history. Queens apply something similar to ‘Perfecth’, taking the accumulated fractures of life, relationships and the band itself and building them into the record rather than attempting to hide them.
Even the title refuses perfection. Homme has deliberately broken the word itself, turning ‘perfect’ into ‘Perfecth’ and giving a nonexistent state its own slightly mangled spelling. It fits a band that has rarely sounded particularly interested in clean edges.
‘Perfecth’ is the follow-up to 2023’s ‘In Times New Roman…’ and arrives during another particularly active period for Homme. Alongside the new Queens material, he has collaborated with Shania Twain on ‘Faded Blue Jeans’ and contributed guest vocals to Mastodon’s ‘Snakes for Dinner’.
More importantly for Australian and New Zealand fans, new music is about to be followed by the band themselves. Queens of the Stone Age will be doing a headline tour through Australia and New Zealand later this year as part of a wider stretch that also takes them through Japan and Singapore. The shows follow their current North American stadium dates with Foo Fighters, with further 2027 headline dates still to come.
Few bands make it through this many albums without sanding away some of their stranger instincts. Queens of the Stone Age appear to be heading in the opposite direction. ‘Perfecth’ finds Homme, Van Leeuwen, Shuman, Fertita and Theodore embracing the cracks, contradictions and imperfections that have accumulated along the way, then seeing what happens when they put them all back together.
‘Perfecth’ arrives October 30 via Matador Records and Remote Control Records.
