Queens of the Stone Age

Considering Josh’s personal and health problems, along with the media storms surrounding him, I was surprised by how active he and Queens of the Stone Age have been in recent years.

Their previous album, 2023’s In Times New Roman…, was made in the shadow of Josh’s divorce and his recovery from cancer. Since then, the band have played more than 200 shows, with a break for another operation and time for their frontman to recover. They have performed in intimate venues to promote Alive in the Catacombs, an EP recorded in the Paris catacombs, as well as in huge stadiums, supporting Foo Fighters and System of a Down.

Perfecth is an album much closer in spirit to the catacombs, mostly filled with quieter songs steeped in dark blues. The band have completely dropped the signature jagged riffs that could get a stadium moving. There’s some rock ’n’ roll spirit in Where the Goth Girls At?, but it’s the exception.

Personally, this direction really appeals to me. After all, Long Slow Goodbye was one of the first songs that made me fall in love with QOTSA. My problem with this album lies elsewhere: while there are individual moments I enjoy, as a whole it sounds like a collection of random tracks. The standouts are the ballad From the Cliff, which could easily fit on Lullabies to Paralyze, and Phantom Limb, by far the most interesting and fully realised song here. I tried to find a common thread running through the album, but without much luck.

When I started digging, it turned out that most of the songs on Perfecth had been written over the past decade or so and had never found a home on the band’s albums. The dark, bluesy single Insignificant Other is left over from the sessions for their previous record. Album opener It’s Only Love, which sounds like a Mark Lanegan ballad, was written around 2010 for… Mark Lanegan. The even older Run Away from the Mob dates back 25 years, and its original version was recorded with Dave Grohl. Then there’s Sunday, a song Josh gave to Iggy Pop for their album Post Pop Depression. Here, we get a QOTSA version that barely differs from the original and feels like an entirely unnecessary addition.

Is it a good thing that these songs have finally seen the light of day? Absolutely. But if Josh was going to dig through his archives, a record featuring more unreleased material, perhaps even a double album, would have been much more interesting. As we know, the QOTSA frontman has a restless creative mind and enjoys working with others, from friends in his own musical circle to more surprising collaborators such as Lady Gaga and Shania Twain. I’m convinced he has entire folders full of unreleased songs and ideas.

A collection like that would have been a good way to close a chapter, and perhaps even say goodbye to old friends such as Mark Lanegan. Meanwhile, Mono and Phantom Limb, the two most interesting new songs on Perfecth, might have been better saved for the next album, opening a whole new chapter with a bang. Well, perhaps a gentle one. Because it looks like we may slowly have to get used to this side of the band: dark ballads in place of fast riffs.