The album Josh Homme called the coolest thing he ever made: “A total recharge”
Everything about Queens of the Stone Age radiates swagger. Although they have one of the weirder signature sounds in modern rock, hearing Josh Homme work his way through whatever genre that he wants tends to be way more interesting than hearing most of his contemporaries throwing the same cookie-cutter tracks at the wall and hoping something sticks. For Homme, any artist’s journey is all about taking risks, and he thought that working alongside Iggy Pop was still one of the best experiments that he had ever been a part of.
Then again, Homme was never that far off from punk rock. If anything, the stoner rock movement that he was brought up in when forming Kyuss seemed to be a descendant of that punk rock mindset, only in a metal context. Sure, they didn’t have to play anything as fast, but the idea of putting so much distortion around a track that speakers sound like they’re about to break is one of the most anti-establishment moves anyone could make.
Even when looking at the early QOTSA records, there’s still a lot of punk left in Homme’s DNA, from the song ‘Six Shooter’ to having the audacity to make an entire track based around one chord and a bunch of drugs listed off on ‘Feel Good Hit of the Summer’. But if Homme was going to jam with the man who arguably invented punk, he had to come correct.
Outside of his job as a producer, Post Pop Depression might be one of the more intriguing albums that Homme has lent his skills to. Sure, it still has that slightly offbeat desert rock sound to it, but having Pop’s voice on top of everything makes it all the more chaotic half the time. Whereas Homme could have found his own lane and stuck with it, hearing Pop go off the rails just reaffirmed the idea that anything goes as long as it suits the song.
Even when making later albums like Villains, Homme still thought that working with Pop was one of the biggest highlights of his career, telling Guitar World, “Doing Iggy’s record, Post Pop Depression, was the single coolest thing I’ve ever been allowed to be part of. It was a total recharge. It left me feeling like, ‘Let’s go get ’em, boys!’ I love Iggy so much because I really try my best to live in the third truth—you know, yours, mine and what actually happened.”
While Villains might not have received the warmest reception after Post Pop Depression, the fact that it’s so different is probably half the reason why Homme wanted to make it in the first place. Working with someone like Mark Ronson was sure to trigger alarm bells for a lot of people, but Homme would rather have a dud do what he wanted than roll over with the same sound again.
Because if you think about it, that’s the way that Pop lived his glory years as well. He certainly had some help in his solo career from artists like David Bowie, but he never had any interest in making music that sounded like The Idiot or Lust For Life for the rest of his life, which may explain why he ended up covering the standard ‘Well Did You Evah’ with Debby Harry.
Even though the rockstar lifestyle has come in and out of the spotlight in recent years, Homme is still one of the few that can still make it look effortlessly cool, and that’s partly down to Pop’s influence. Most people tend to call anything with a guitar ‘dad rock’ today, but Homme learned a long time ago that the key to immortality is to never fully outgrow your punk roots.
