Queens of the Stone Age Turn Inward on ‘Perfecth’

Queens of the Stone Age have a new album, Perfecth, out on Matador, and it is smaller than the band’s reputation. The record runs a little over half an hour. There are no fist-pumping choruses, no show-off leads, none of the frontman bluster Josh Homme has traded on across nine albums and nearly thirty years. Mostly, he sets those tools down.

The palette is early ’70s: warm, slightly warped electric piano on the opening “Insignificant Other”; a stretch of odd-meter, semi-progressive rock on “Mono”; the acoustic Laurel Canyon melancholy of “From the Cliff,” addressed to someone walking away for good. “Easy Street” brings in Nikki Lane for a clipped, minimal arrangement, and “It’s Only Love” keeps the seams of the recording audible rather than smoothed over.

The circumstances are not incidental. In the years between records, Homme’s divorce and custody fight played out in public, a close friend was nearly killed during an attack at a show, and he faced his own cancer diagnosis, a period he worked through on the 2025 mini-LP Alive in the Catacombs. Perfecth