Perfecth

Queens Of The Stone Age — 2026

“Josh Homme and company have aged like a fine arsenic red, delivering a record that’s devious with its poison but still raucous with fun and merriment.”

If you want to know how Josh Homme is doing, look no further than Queens of the Stone Age’s last KEXP session. The band is shrouded in a sinister red; strings and horns add a distinguished gravitas; Homme floats around the space with improvised cleaver conduction. Near the end of the session, an interview is given; a question about the show in the Parisian Catacombs is brought up, and Homme’s humility shows. He gives the story about asking the question to play as a dumb, stoner, meathead. He then says, “It was my question that was wrong; until I was unstupid enough to ask the right questions, I changed my intention and the wording changed with the intention.”

At fifty-three years old, forty-one years in bands, that is one hell of a statement to make. Homme is a frontman that has projected major machismo driven with a V8 heart and devilish hips. That’s still there to a minor extent, but Queens’ ninth album Perfecth shows us an “elder” gentleman of rock—the entire band too. To spin a vivid pun, it’s Father John Piss-ty with a Dean Martin reverence towards a lot of the subject matter.

The album scrawl reads, Perfecth comes from the idea that “perfect,” as a word, has never been honest. Homme goes on to say, “Nothing in this world is perfect, but everything seems to be perfecth. And that title is funny when you’re in a group, but it ain’t so funny when you’re alone.” This tone is set immediately by “It’s Only Love.” The dark humor starts instantly as a seemingly despondent Homme experiments with death by train. Songs like “Mono” have the band twinkling along as Homme literally pines into madness for a loved one, a big nod to “it ain’t so funny when you’re alone.” “Sunday” has that Eagles of Death Metal throwback funk, sleaze that only a song from the Post-Pop Depression sessions could have.

The more I’ve listened to 2023’s In Times New Roman…, the less it has stuck with me. It’s a perfectly capable QOTSA album, especially when compared to 2017’s Villains, which was another slate of fun songs. In the previous review for the group’s last album, I go into the unexpected dirty laundry that aired about Homme’s personal life. While you could feel some of those influences there, Perfecth is where it feels truly realized. When Homme calls out, “Never felt so alive on the day I almost died,” on “Where The Goth Girls At?” it feels heavy because in 2010 he basically died on the operating table and in 2023 had surgery to remove an unknown cancer. It’s “life as art” mixed with the subtleties that “Alive in the Catacombs” brought.

When you’ve amassed a catalog like QOTSA have, it has to be hard to continue to offer unique ideas and satisfy fans all the same. A strong self-titled debut; Rated R into their strong mainstream explosion Songs for the Deaf; the follow-up, Lullabies to Paralyze, that continued their rock and roll reign; the classic …Like Clockwork, that reinvented the band with one of their most powerful releases yet; the aforementioned Villains and In Times New Roman…. And now, with all the previous shit, Queens and Homme are saying “yes to life” with Perfecth.

Homme and Co. have aged like a fine arsenic red, devious with the poison, but raucous with the fun and merriment. A crippled, demented fanfare of “fuck it all” pagan mysticism. Perfecth will be a divisive album among the fanbase. It has grit for sure, but it’s soft and smoothed out. The appeal isn’t immediate, but multiple listens help perpetuate the vision to tangle you up in plaid.