Josh Homme, who likes a pun, sings about “emotion sickness” twice on the eighth Queens of the Stone Age album. There’s a single with that title, which finds the American hard rock band adding some cute three-part harmonies to their violent riffing. The phrase also appears in the earlier song Negative Space, a darker melody on which Homme sings: “My love will not survive/ Emotion sickness, I wanna die.”
He probably returns to it because the past few years have sent the 50-year-old reeling from events in his personal life. Multiple close friends have died in their fifties, the best known being Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, grunge pioneer Mark Lanegan and the actor Rio Hackford. Over the past few years he has divorced and engaged in an ongoing custody battle over his three children with the rock musician Brody Dalle – a process so contentious and convoluted that this album was sent to reviewers with an accompanying 700-word media statement from Homme on the situation. Then this month he revealved in an interview that he is recovering from surgery on an unspecified cancer: “Just the cherry on top of an interesting time period.”
So there’s a weight of feeling to the words on this album that wasn’t so present in a lot of the band’s earlier work, when the heft of the drums and the sleaziness of the guitar work felt more important on their usually exhilarating rock music. In 2000 the band’s breakthrough song, Feel Good Hit of the Summer, contained only the simple repeated line: “Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol.”
This time, Paper Machete has whizzy pace and a basic punk riff that recalls another recently revived band that had their biggest moments in the early 2000s, The Hives. But the lyrics express a sharply directed anger that makes it more than just a fun one for the mosh pit: “Now I know you’d use anything, anyone, to make yourself look clean/ In sickness, no vows mean anything.” Another highlight, Made to Parade, has a mighty glam rock stomp and Homme doing his best Bowie sneer as he spits: “Slake your thirst, bitches/ Come get what you deserve/ Kill the very last whale aboard a yacht of fur.”
Elsewhere, some memorable tunes are forsaken to prioritise a rough, raw sound that feels far from the dancier moments on their last album, Villains. Straight Jacket Fitting doesn’t do enough of interest to justify its nine-minute length. But there’s a power and emotion here that is genuinely felt.
