QOTSA Explores Hurting and Healing on ‘Perfecth’: Review

Give Josh Homme credit. The Queens of the Stone Age frontman has made each of his band’s nine albums distinctive without straying too far from the fuzz-filled alternative stoner rock that has made the group a pillar of the 21st-century hard rock community.

From 1998’s riff-driven self-titled debut to 2023’s COVID-era personal-demons-exorcising In Times New Roman…, QOTSA have stayed in a lane they’ve pretty much dominated since 2002’s Songs for the Deaf elevated them to mainstream success. (2013’s …Like Clockwork debuted at No. 1 and kicked off a string of Top 10 albums.) The moody, experimental and occasionally acoustic Perfecth stays mostly on the same unwavering path.

Homme named the album after his imperfect spelling of “perfect,” which represents the broken pieces that have begun to repair his personal life over the past few years. That’s a good summation of Perfecth, a record about love and loss, hurting and healing. Nothing’s perfect, not even these songs, but Queens of the Stone Age chart a course across nine tracks that exploit their flaws yet still manage to approach an apotheosis.

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“We all make plans until life gets in the way,” Homme sings in “Insignificant Other,” outlining the prevalent theme of Perfecth. Like In Times New Roman…‘s anxiety reckoning, the album sweeps up Homme’s fears and concerns as he tries to make sense of them amid smudged melodies and misshapen guitars. Slow-burning opener “It’s Only Love” barely runs three minutes, yet not a second of its music, not even the mood-setting, ambient intro, is wasted.

Watch the Video for Queens of the Stone Age’s ‘Easy Street’

At 36 minutes, Perfecth is QOTSA’s shortest album and, in many ways, their leanest. The soulful sway of “Insignificant Other” percolates over nearly six minutes with bottom-heavy dread; “Where the Goth Girls At?” lines its initial start-stop rhythm with bristling feedback; “Sunday” is Young Americans funk with gnarlier guitars; and “Easy Street” is melancholic self-laceration. Together they form the aftershocks of a broken relationship, but Homme isn’t any closer to mending his damaged heart at the end of Perfecth. His love and his album about it remain scarred to the core.

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