The album that made Josh Homme quit Kyuss
Josh Homme has always prioritised doing what he wanted before anything else in his music career. Although he may have carved out his unique voice as the frontman behind Queens of the Stone Age, the majority of his music has revolved around doing whatever he was feeling at the moment, either making robotic rock with his stoner rock outfit or playing alongside artists as diverse as the supergroup Them Crooked Vultures of Run the Jewels. Although Homme has worked with many music legends, he credits one punk legend for giving him the drive in the early days.
Before he had even thought of putting together Queens of the Stone Age, Homme was already working on the beginnings of stoner rock with Kyuss. Taking the best parts of the hard rock and metal he had heard as a kid, Homme quickly developed his style by tuning his guitar down to unheard-of levels.
Getting the same groovy textures found in a typical bass rig, Kyuss would deliver some of the heaviest stoner rock out of the 1990s landscape. Although grunge was happening around the same time, the heavy hitters of the day were also paying attention, with Dave Grohl professing his love for the band every chance he could while in Nirvana.
Even though Kyuss could have continued playing the same type of heavy rock everyone knew them for, Homme could tell there was a limited time for them. Since they would spend most of their later career chasing their tail, Homme was inspired to cut off Kyuss when he heard Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life.
Free from the confines of The Stooges, the original punk brought some of the catchiest songs to his catalogue on his solo smash, turning in raucous rock and roll on the title track and a standard pop song on the track ‘The Passenger’. When hearing those songs again, Homme thought the key to that kind of freedom was outside of Kyuss.
Discussing the album’s impact, Homme would tell SPIN, “I heard Lust for Life, and it actually made me quit Kyuss. I listened to it obsessively for two and a half years, and at the end, I thought, ‘There are just way too many bands out there, and if you want to know what I have to say, just listen to this record. It’s all here.’”
Dissolving what was left of Kyuss, Homme took the basis of what he was working on and channelled it into Queens of the Stone Age, offering up riffs that hit like a sledgehammer with a greater emphasis on musical freedom. While the first steps into the new outfit would be strange, albums like Rated R captured what the group could do, taking the standard rock and roll tropes and turning them into something no one had heard.
Homme would even go on to work with Pop in the future, going out with him on the road and helping put together his album Post Pop Depression in the 2010s. Although Pop may have been looking to stretch himself musically, Homme found a companion in that music that would become instrumental to the future of alternative rock.
