Queens of the Stone Age Announce Perfecth and “Insignificant Other” Is the Vertigo-Inducing Centerpiece

Queens of the Stone Age have announced their ninth album, Perfecth, out October 30 on Matador Records. The title is intentional: the word “perfect” has never been honest, Homme says, so he broke it. “Nothing in this world is perfect, but everything seems to be ‘perfecth.’” The record was produced by Homme and bassist Michael Shuman, recorded in sessions from New Orleans to Los Angeles, and maps nine different forms of love — family, friends, the loves that break you, the loves that don’t.

“Insignificant Other” is the album’s centerpiece and arrived from only the second take, the quintet playing loose and making space for each other in real time. It is a song about distance, about someone who was your entire world simply vanishing, and about the strange vertigo of being on the receiving end of that. It is also immediately one of the best things Queens of the Stone Age have recorded in years. Homme, Troy Van Leeuwen, Shuman, Dean Fertita, and Jon Theodore sound like a band that has moved a career’s worth of jagged pieces into alignment and arrived at something hard-won and clear.

The band resumes their North American stadium run with Foo Fighters in September before headline shows in Iceland, Japan, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand through December. Pre-order the album below.

Pre-order Perfecth ↗

1“It’s Only Love”

2“Insignificant Other”

3“Where the Goth Girls At?”

4“Mono”

5“From the Cliff”

6“Sunday”

7“Easy Street”

8“Phantom Limb”

9“Run Away from the Mob”