Queens of the Stone Age Perfecth Due in October with Imperfection as Philosophy

Queens of the Stone Age have built the ninth studio album Perfecth around a deliberate refusal to sand away the rough edges, with frontman Josh Homme framing the record as a document of human error left intact. Due on 30 October via Matador Records, the album arrives alongside a new track, ‘Insignificant Other’, which Homme considers its centrepiece.

Queens of the Stone Age Perfecth and the Art of the Kept Mistake

The band recorded Perfecth across sessions in New Orleans, Joshua Tree and Los Angeles, according to Revolver. The geographical spread feels apt for a record that deliberately refuses a single, unified sonic surface. Homme and Michael Shuman produced it, and the nine songs, organised loosely around different varieties of love, romantic, familial, platonic and the kinds that wound before they instruct, were designed to feel as though each occupies its own world. ‘Every song sounds like it’s from a different world,’ Homme says, ‘and that’s on purpose.’

‘Insignificant Other’ emerged right at the tail end of sessions for 2023’s In Times New Roman, captured on the second of just two takes at around midnight on the final day. Homme, Troy Van Leeuwen, Shuman, Dean Fertita and Jon Theodore recorded it live, with Homme calling the arrangement out as they played. ‘We played the parts and I called the arrangement out,’ he recalls to SPIN. ‘The interesting thing about doing that is that everyone has to look at each other. You’re really listening and playing together. Tempos go like this and there’s some tuning issues and there’s little mistakes, but it sounds so fucking human.’

That instinctive, unpolished quality was not an accident left in reluctantly, it became the governing principle of the whole record. ‘This record largely became about not even believing that you can correct anything,’ Homme says. ‘You can gloss it over like it never happened, but you know it happened. In a world where there’s a lot of fixing and a lot of correcting, it feels good to say, okay, well, we’re not doing that. Not in an angry way, but there’s enough of that going on. We’ll just be humans about it.’

Tom Petty, the Rolling Stones, and a Nighttime Feeling

Homme acknowledges the song carries an unusual, loose-limbed feel he associates with the Rolling Stones, but the more specific touchstone for the band was Tom Petty’s ‘You Got Lucky’. ‘There’s a particular feeling that it’s nighttime and the lights are low,’ he explains. ‘”Miss You” has that feeling too. That really permeated this record.’ It is the kind of reference point that locates Perfecth squarely in a tradition of rock music that values atmosphere and texture over technical display, and it suggests QOTSA are as interested in restraint here as they have ever been in density.

The lyricism of ‘Insignificant Other’ orbits ideas of distance and loss: the specific vertigo of watching someone who once felt like your entire world quietly disappear. Homme links the album’s emotional range to ‘love, lust, foolishness’ and the wisdom that accumulates afterward, a trajectory from wound to scar tissue to something harder to name.

The album’s title is characteristic: ‘perfect’ broken apart into ‘perfecth’, a quiet act of linguistic sabotage that refuses the word’s impossible promise. Listeners with strong opinions about that, or anything else, are invited to ring the band’s new complaint hotline at (760) 437-1966, where they can air their ‘gripes and grievances’, and may, the band suggests, find a member on the other end.

The LP announcement comes with a Chapman Baehler-directed video starring real-life QOTSA children and pets. The band is currently on a short break from its summer stadium tour opening for Foo Fighters, a run that has also afforded Homme some extended off-stage time with Dave Grohl. ‘I met him when I was 19,’ Homme says, ‘and by this point, we’ve been through all kinds of crazy shit. That’s hard to understand and reconcile and navigate, but it makes that friendship really valuable.’

The full tracklisting for Perfecth is: ‘It’s Only Love’, ‘Insignificant Other’, ‘Where the Goth Girls At?’, ‘Mono’, ‘From the Cliff’, ‘Sunday’, ‘Easy Street’, ‘Phantom Limb’, ‘Run Away From the Mob’.