On the press run for his latest project, Josh Homme mentioned something his band shares with Star Wars aside from the cult following and the fact that these aren’t the droids you’re looking for: Queens of the Stone Age is a group that deals in trilogies. Rather than telling a continuous straightforward story, though, the triads weave in and out of each other to evoke moods that explain the general path they want you to take. They are at times self-referential, prophetic, reflective, circuitous, and chronologically confused. Band members have entered and exited during and between these periods, with no one constant but Josh himself. This still doesn’t detract from the concept, and some people had a feeling that it was the case before it was confirmed. The confusing part to some was how they could have two trilogies but eight albums. Where was the first one? Which projects were orphaned, and why? I think I’ve got the answers.
Queens of the Stone Age’s Rated-R Songs for the Deaf
The band’s opening trilogy spans the first three albums. The first, the self-titled Queens of the Stone Age, born in the ashes of Kyuss and after a name change from Gamma Ray, saw Homme playing everything but the drums and giving us the most stripped down, straight-ahead, unadorned rock we’d ever get out of the band. It’s still got the trappings you’d come to expect, like his falsetto on songs such as “Regular John” and “If Only,” as well as his metanarrative on “You Would Know” where he uses the song’s structure to reinforce the verse story of the ritual of drug use and the beautiful release into the full chorus at the end. It’s a simple album and a strong foundation.
The second album, Rated R, was an album of degrowth and degeneracy as much as it was an evolution in sound and style. More songs are about drug use than aren’t, and “Feel Good Hit of the Summer” is literally just drugs. It’s also an intentional contradiction between the title and the content, a thumbed nose at the listener and not the first (listen all the way through “I Think I Lost My Headache” and you’ll see). The aggression is dialed up dramatically compared to the first album, like on “Feel Good Hit of the Summer” and “Tension Head,” but then there’s just as many moments where they break out into something more unabashedly pretty than anything on that album, like “Auto Pilot” and “Lightning Song.” This also marks the introduction of Nick Oliveri’s singing and bass as well as Mark Lanegan’s iconic voice to the Queens canon. Some songs like “Monster in the Parasol” feel like direct evolutions of the robotic riffing from the first, while some like “The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret” felt like an attempt to take the more mainstream elements of that sound and push it further to the point where it was radio friendly (even with most of the album being almost concertedly radio unfriendly). There’s elements of social commentary and refutations of popular trends sprinkled in, most notably in “Better Living Through Chemistry.” The band was being pushed and pulled into several different directions on this project, and I think this might have been where the next one got its inspiration.
Songs for the Deaf closes out this first trilogy, and fully realizes some of the themes on the first two projects while also committing to its own unique concept: the sounds of a drive through the desert, as heard through the radio. The three singers we had on Rated R are utilized to the fullest, with Oliveri and Lanegan taking four turns each as the lead and Homme only seven (Homme and Lanegan share the role on “Song for the Deaf“). You’d be forgiven for not remembering who the actual bandleader is here. So many songs feel like they could have been written in direct response to some of my above points. The radio station bits are both parody (continuing the social commentary introduced before) and frame every song on the album as being something you could hear getting airplay, which is sometimes a correct prediction (“No One Knows“) and other times hilarious considering the abrasiveness and subject matter (“Six Shooter“). “Another Love Song” is decidedly NOT a love song, like how “Feel Good Hit of the Summer” wasn’t ever going to be a summer hit (or really even make you feel good, if you took everything it mentioned). “You Think I Ain’t Worth a Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire” is a blend of the squarely riff-oriented writing from the self-titled album and the aggression and consumer-directed middle fingers of Rated R (note the false ending that jars you upon first listen, a technique that would get used again later on “Song for the Dead” to even greater effect) and amps it all up beyond what they’d done before. “Go With the Flow” is the radio friendly smash hit replete with big budget award-winning music video that they had flirted with prior but never quite captured. “First It Giveth” is a haunting drug song that does more than most (if not all) of the previous ones to get its idea across. “Mosquito Song” is the prettiest song yet and yet has the darkest lyrics and themes, their greatest musical contradiction ever. You even get a laughed reprise of “Feel Good Hit of the Summer” right before the end just in case you needed any more proof that one, it was a joke, and two, these things are all connected. This album feels big and is big, a crescendo to finish out what ended up being a collection of albums that documents the band going from essentially a solo project to a sprawling genre-defying collective. I don’t believe this path was intentional at first, but I do think by the time they were done, they knew what they’d done and set out to do it again their next time out.
Failure to Launch: Lullabies to Paralyze and the Era Vulgaris
They didn’t do it again their next time out. Lullabies to Paralyze is a fantastic album and would easily be the best in most other bands’ discographies, but something about it just didn’t hit the same. Where Songs for the Deaf felt varied, Lullabies felt disjointed. Where Queens of the Stone Age stayed relatively smooth, Lullabies lacked bite. Where Rated R snarled, Lullabies lurched and stumbled. Again, though, this is a great album. “Burn the Witch” into “In My Head” into “Little Sister” is a damn insane three song run that almost no one could live up to. “Long Slow Goodbye” is one of the greatest mourning songs ever written and has made countless hundreds cry in recent years as it’s been dedicated to the memories of several fallen friends of Homme (more on them toward the end). Quality is definitely not the issue here. The issue is that there’s just not enough meat here to form a story around. The album itself can’t seem to decide whether it wants to focus on being dark and gothic, melancholy and heartbroken, or carnal and passionate. Songs about hardcore fucking are back to back with songs about a doomed relationship falling apart or losing a loved one. There’s no through line, and you can’t start off a series without that. The band went back into the studio and tried to refocus on creating a new beginning their next time out.
They didn’t create a new beginning their next time out. Era Vulgaris is again an amazing project, one anyone would be ecstatic to have had a hand in, you could argue even an improvement over their last outing, but it still wasn’t trilogy material. They took elements of the philosophy of the first trilogy: the idea of making something sonically consistent start to finish came from the self-titled debut, they went heavier than the last one like they did on Rated R, they expanded on the social commentary and guest roster and album concept like on Songs for the Deaf. The only thing left over from Lullabies was the darkness, which was turned up to 11 and put through an electronic filter. The album’s sound is angular, crunchy, digital but still human, dissonant at times, droning. The themes are a mirror of Songs for the Deaf; where one reflected the radio on a trip through the desert, the other reflects an inner monologue on a drive into Hollywood. The façades of the people and places, the sickness just beneath the surfaces, the feelings of being in a new environment with misplaced confidence and being knocked back down to Earth, learning how to bluff your way through life to fit in with the rest of the scene. Songs like “Misfit Love” and the title track (inexplicably left off the standard release) are perfectly emblematic of these ideas. The only problem with all this is that not only did they perfect what they were going for, leaving no room for deeper dives, but they didn’t land on a concept that lends itself to being expanded upon in the first place. There’s nowhere to go from here, and so they didn’t go anywhere from here. They would need something deeper, broader yet more personal, something more raw to be built upon.
In Times New Roman…the Villains Come…Like Clockwork
…Like Clockwork is deeper. It’s broader, yet more personal. It’s more raw. It’s the perfect way to start something off while also being a perfect standalone piece of art. Josh Homme inadvertently gave himself the impetus of a lifetime when he went too hard with drugs, was clinically dead for a time, and was put out of action for months recovering from that and a particularly nasty MRSA infection. Certainly the darkest time in his life to that point, and he invited the rest of the band “into the fog” to work on what would become this album. This thing just sounds like a magnum opus, it’s uncanny. Songs like “I Appear Missing” and “The Vampyre of Time and Memory” are not only haunting and depressing, they’re beautiful. It’s the sound of someone facing death and trying to claw their way out, refusing to accept that there’s a definite end to all this. It’s losing a love and pining after it, like on “I Sat By the Ocean.” It’s that one last night of debauchery before your number’s up, depicted on “Smooth Sailing.” It’s a fight against the end of something, of everything, and in that, there’s potential for more. For a man to struggle this hard with these inevitabilities, he’d have to be leaving something behind that’s too good to lose. A life, a love, a family, something so compelling he would go face to face with Death herself and have the gall to say “not yet.” Fortunately, there was a lot of material there to explore in the follow-ups.
Villains is a strange album. Unlike Rated R, it doesn’t exactly evolve on its predecessor or even reference it. It doesn’t sound like …Like Clockwork, and it doesn’t even sound like Queens of the Stone Age a lot of the time. It’s an album produced by Mark Ronson of all people, although that allegedly didn’t have much impact on the sound of the thing. It’s polarizing, garnering some critical acclaim but usually bottoming fans’ rankings of the band’s discography. It’s a looser affair, with some elements of dance sneaking in and carrying different sorts of grooves than we’re used to. Personally, it’s my least favorite of their works, but it’s a lot easier to appreciate in hindsight and in context. This isn’t supposed to stand alone, definitely not now that there’s a full trilogy around it but not even when it first came out. It’s not even supposed to be a canonically factual recounting of events and feelings. It’s something akin to your life flashing before your eyes: a greatest hits collection of the best of times. The way Homme met his wife Brody Dalle, inviting her into his “fortress” of a heart after hers gives way first and opens up to him, that she “gave birth to monsters that will terrorize normalcy,” the idea of this perfect love being “always, evermore, and on and on,” these aren’t exactly how the relationship played out. This is rose-tinted and glamorized, accentuated by the clean-cut production and flashes of glitz. This is what Homme sees before he faces his mortality, and now we see exactly why he raged so hard against the dying of the light. If your life had gone as perfect as this album pretends his did, wouldn’t you? Villains explains …Like Clockwork, and …Like Clockwork justifies Villains. Now that these two are connected so perfectly, the sensible question is: where can you possibly go from here?
Sometimes the universe has a fucked up way of doling out pain. The last person that needed to get knocked down a peg is the one that falls the hardest. Josh Homme was living a seemingly charmed life with his wife and kids, riding high after a celebratory album that followed an undisputed masterpiece. Then people started leaving him. One of his best friends, Anthony Bourdain, killed himself halfway across the world in France. COVID happened and took all of his fans from his stages. Mark Lanegan, such an integral part to Josh’s successes and a close friend, died too. Taylor Hawkins followed not long after. Then it was Rio Hackford. Also, I forgot to mention that his wife filed for divorce during all this and their yearslong (and ongoing) battle has seen him win custody of their children, her and her new boyfriend forge documents to accuse him of heinous crimes, and other awful drama. Oh, and he had cancer. If he thought he was low during the …Like Clockwork era, that was nothing. This is the one time that made him contemplate suicide. He wasn’t fighting death anymore. It would have been welcome at this point. A relief. At least at the end of all this, there’s an end to all this. And voilà, there’s an album in that. A capstone to this trilogy. First the fight, then what you’re fighting for in the first place, and now, what happens when you don’t have anything left to fight for? That’s how we end up In Times New Roman…. This is somehow at once darker than the bleakest parts of …Like Clockwork and more free than the most footloose moments on Villains. It turns out, if you let yourself give in, there’s a release in that, a bit of ecstasy before it all goes away. You get macabre anthems like “Made to Parade” or petulant defiance like on the back half of “What the Peephole Say,” but you also get lyrics that make you stop and reflect on the gravity of the situation like “when there’s nothing I can do, accept, enjoy the view, when there’s nothing I can do, I smile,” or “my love will not survive emotion sickness, I wanna die.” This isn’t just an album of death and passivity, though, not even close. Even at the end of the line, there’s still room to be justifiably bitter and angry and scathing. There are straight up diss tracks on this album, pointed squarely at Dalle in everything but the most direct of terms. She speaks “lioness and damsel in distress so fluently,” she’s a “coward as sharp as a paper machete,” she wants to “put up a fight” because “baby don’t care for” Homme. Once upon a time you could have been forgiven for thinking “You’re So Vague” could be directed at his own lyrics, but not anymore. You don’t have to read anything into these songs. They also serve as the closest thing to direct refutations of Villains, a sign that no, it was never that good, it never could be, and it’ll never be. It’s all tied together now. But just in case it wasn’t clear enough, Homme leaves a breadcrumb in the last song that leads you straight back to the feelings from …Like Clockwork: “Hold me close, I’m confused, I don’t wanna go out; I told myself, ‘you can do this,’ I’m having my doubts.” Even after all that, he’s still not a hundred percent okay with letting go. Even in these times new Roman…even when you think you’ve accepted your role as the villain, the self-doubt creeps in…like clockwork. The trilogy completes again.
3v3
It’s hard to pick a favorite trilogy for me. You might have yours, or you might be about to go experience these albums for the first time. I think if you look at them as objectively as you can, the most recent set is a lot more explicitly connected and thematically strong. Both are made up of great works of art, though, and I think it all really comes down to which three hit you harder. Songs for the Deaf is often considered their best album, and Villains is often considered their worst, so the average fan might pick the first set as the strongest overall. We’ve had the most time to listen to and grow with the songs from the first trilogy, and if you’re around my age, you might have grown up on them. There might be recency bias at play in the other direction, with the latest album only coming out two and a half months ago. I genuinely don’t know how I could pick in a keep-one-lose-one scenario. I’m curious what you think, so if you have an opinion, please feel free to leave it in the comments or on Discord or anywhere you want. Thanks for reading, and this is me “not saying good night, just saying.“