The new Queens of the Stone Age is worse than imperfect
06 Nov 2026I can’t fuck to this and that’s not okay.
Remember OKCupid? Maybe not as well as I do. It was where I put a lot of my energy for a while. I drafted and redrafted that page, tested and iterated on phrasing, refined and distilled the personality I was broadcasting via a handful of webcam and phone snaps until it was as perfect as possible. Was the effort worth the rewards? Who’s keeping score?
Okcupid had a strange USP. They played with statistics and published a data blog, Priceonomics type stuff. Keyword clustering creating a narrative which is simultaneously comforting and surprising. A challenging mixture of information to engage the cerebral cortex of the undersexed.
One memorable post was entitled “Stuff white people like” where these stats people highlighted phrases that were characteristic of particular groups of users. I don’t want to be a stereotype but I can’t argue with this.
Stuff white people like, the male version.
Okay so QotSA might pretty fairly sit on the white guy likes list but Joshua Homme has always considered a diverse audience to be a part of the brand. Kyuss were the support band for a Metallica tour in the early 90s and it’s from then onwards you’ll find Homme talking about creating the sorts of parties he would want to be at. I’d definitely want that after spending weeks looking at uniform walls of headbangers in Master of Puppets t-shirts.
Years later, in the aftermath of Nick Oliveri getting the boot, live shows had more of an emphasis on a groovy sexy mood. Listen to bootlegs from 2005 and Josh is regularly admonishing moshers and encouraging dancing.
Maybe this was why QotSA consistently featured on OKC profiles. You can be a big tough guy, you can be a biker rockstar punk whatever but you can also move your hips and be a sensitive human. It’s right there in the band name.
One other thing that always resonated with me was how there was never a pretence at being infallible. Much of the Desert Sessions material doesn’t quite work but the joy is in digging through and finding the little flourishes, the daft moments. The membership of the band is frequently changing, perhaps more for the sake of making things different than iterating towards some possible ideal.
The first album ends with a nasty blast of synthesiser noise, damaging the speakers and ears of listeners who zoned out over the final tracks. The second ends with a song which disassembles itself into a hypnotic trumpet jam, again culminating in an assault on the listener. Songs for the Deaf constantly interrupts the listener with pretend radio DJs, intentionally disrupting the experience.
Worse, each of the records is sullied with outtakes from prior projects or reworkings of side project pieces. Coherence emerges more through the hands of the producer than a singular vision driving the project. Essentially each is a compilation of newer work and a helping of songs which have had some time to brew, ferment, distil, perhaps with rounds of rewrites along the way.
There’s a sense that the band is well aware of the problems with this new record. You don’t call an album “Perfecth” unless you’re trying to get ahead of imminent criticism. I guess it’s a better method than the Strokes picking a fight with Fantano.
But look, there is no doubt this is a new low for Josh Homme. It’s flat and uninspiring, forgettable and distant. The rerecording of Sunday from the Post Pop Depression project was definitely a mistake. The best parts of this album sound like they could potentially be the breathing space on a good album, the way In The Fade keeps Rated R moving. Honestly though, most of this should just be cut.
I feel like on some level I get it. We’re in a world where everything is polished and perfected with data, machine learning, thousands of rounds of optimisation overnight. Everyone is sick of the same AI generated school fete flyers or Danny Thommo hate crimes. The counterculture of 2026 is fucking things up and not worrying about it.
That doesn’t justify this soggy mush of a record. Perfection is disgusting but what hurts is the total lack of ambition. Maybe they can’t get it up any more. It’s not a polished, gift-wrapped interpretation of Queens of the Stone Age but it’s so far from the strutting, confident, uninhibited Queens we want to hear.
This isn’t the record to show your personality on the dating apps unless you’re sad about Kier Starmer. The next one needs to be loaded with sex and swagger or it might as well just be the Foo Fighters or Elbow.
