The past few years have been an emotionally turbulent time for everyone – none more so than Josh Homme, who was navigating a tempestuous personal life in the midst of a pandemic. An acrimonious and prolonged custody battle followed his divorce from the former Distillers frontwoman Brody Dalle, in 2019. Homme was awarded full custody of their three children in March 2022, in the wake of abuse claims and restraining orders sought on both sides.
Normally, the finer details of an artist’s private life would be irrelevant to their creative output, but Queens of the Stone Age’s eighth album does not shy away from being designated Homme’s “divorce album”. And although it may not go down in music history in the same way as Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, Abba’s The Visitors or Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love, there is evidence that Homme has channelled his heartache, frustration and rage into the band’s most visceral album in years.
Following the upbeat, Mark Ronson-produced Villains, from 2017, In Times New Roman… is something of a return to their earlier fare, self-produced and dispensing with any of the frequent collaborators who have passed through QOTSA’s revolving studio door over the past 27 years. (Rumoured contributions by Dave Grohl and ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons did not materialise.) The tone is set with the album opener, Obscenery, its barbed riff, bluesy saunter and stuttering beat leading into a blazing rock chorus.
The grinding Paper Machete is the first of several songs clearly directed at Dalle, with lyrics such as “In sickness, no vows mean anything” and “You speak lioness and damsel in distress so fluently / Does your every single relation end in pain and misery?” Negative Space’s strident, funk-laced loose swing mentions betrayal and oblivion.
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With all of Homme’s lyrical score-settling, it’s easy to overlook the music. There is undoubtedly a degree of homogeneity to this record, but several tracks provide a counterpoint to the rage-infused riffs.
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What the Peephole Say, set against a backdrop of 1970s glam rock that touches on The Rocky Horror Show and the theatrical nature of Sparks, sees Homme adopt a comedy British accent; the swaggering Emotion Sickness hearkens back to early albums such as Songs for the Deaf and Rated R; Sicily is a sensual, string-laden, cinematic number that atones for the muddled orchestration on Carnavoyeur. The temptation to self-indulge, meanwhile, is clearly overpowering on the unnecessarily long nine-minute closer, Straight Jacket Fitting.
Still, Queens of the Stone Age fans will lap up this album, which is more or less a return to their hard-rock rollicking. More casual fans may wonder what the band have up their sleeve next, now that Homme has, presumably, exorcised his demons.
