Queens of the Stone Age have never been particularly interested in perfection. Why would they be, when there’s so much more fun to be had in the cracks? The band is leaning into that idea with Perfecth, its ninth studio album, due Oct. 30 via Matador Records. Following the Nikki Lane-featuring “Easy Street,” the latest song to emerge from it is “Insignificant Other,” which frontman Josh Homme considers the record’s centerpiece.
First presented at the tail end of sessions for 2023’s In Times New Roman, it was captured on the second of just two takes, preserving a loose, instinctive performance from Homme, Troy Van Leeuwen, Michael Shuman, Dean Fertita and Jon Theodore. Homme describes the song as being about distance, and the vertigo of watching someone who once felt like your entire world simply disappear.
“We recorded ‘Insignificant’ at about midnight,” Homme recalls to SPIN. “The session was done, it was the last day and I just said, I’ve got one more thing. Maybe we just sketch. We played the parts and I called the arrangement out. The interesting thing about doing that is that everyone has to look at each other. You’re really listening and playing together. Tempos go like this and there’s some tuning issues and there’s little mistakes, but it sounds so fucking human. This record largely became about not even believing that you can correct anything. You can gloss it over like it never happened, but you know it happened. In a world where there’s a lot of fixing and a lot of correcting, it feels good to say, okay, well, we’re not doing that. Not in an angry way, but there’s enough of that going on. We’ll just be humans about it.”
Homme acknowledges the unusual Rolling Stones-type feel of the song, but admits, “we kept talking about a particular Tom Petty song, ‘You Got Lucky.’ There’s a particular feeling that it’s nighttime and the lights are low. We’re not playing soft, but we’re not playing loud. We’re just playing. [The Stones song] ‘Miss You’ has that feeling too. That really permeated this record.” The LP announcement also comes with a Chapman Baehler-directed video starring several real-life QOTSA children and pets, which can be seen below.
Produced by Homme and Shuman, Perfecth was recorded across sessions in New Orleans, Joshua Tree, Ca., and Los Angeles and filters its nine songs around different varieties of love — romantic, familial, platonic and the kinds that leave scars before teaching you how to heal. “Every song sounds like it’s from a different world,” Homme says, “and that’s on purpose,” describing an attempt to stitch together emotions surrounding “love, lust, foolishness” and the wisdom that comes afterward.
The title itself is another Homme-ian act of linguistic sabotage: “perfect” suggests an impossible ideal, so he broke the word apart and arrived at “perfecth.” Feeling a certain way about that, or other topics? Feel free to phone up the band’s new complaint hotline at (760) 437-1966, where listeners can air their “gripes and grievances” and maybe even find a band member on the other end.
QOTSA is on a short break from its summer stadium tour opening for Foo Fighters, during which Homme and Dave Grohl got to spend some extra offstage time together. “Dave’s been renting a car and he and I have been going on adventures,” he reports. “We go to breakfast all the time and things like that, but it’s different when it’s just me and him and there’s seven hours of being friends. We went and found his grandma’s burial plot at a cemetery in Ohio and saw his boyhood home. Then I took him to Bass Pro Shops for the first time ever and then we found a fireworks store, which was massive. We were the only ones in there and we spent a lot of money (laughs). I met him when I was 19, and by this point, we’ve been through all kinds of crazy shit. That’s hard to understand and reconcile and navigate, but it makes that friendship really valuable. It means a lot to me, because who else would understand?”
Here is the track list for Perfecth:
“It’s Only Love”
“Insignificant Other”
“Where the Goth Girls At?”
“Mono”
“From the Cliff”
“Sunday”
“Easy Street”
“Phantom Limb”
“Run Away From the Mob”