Why did Josh Homme self-finance the first Queens of the Stone Age album?
Josh Homme has been part of some of rock’s most beloved bands since the late 1980s, but Queens of the Stone Age is easily his most popular outfit. He founded the hard rock band in 1996 after his previous group, Kyuss, dissolved – which Homme had joined when he was just 14. With QOTSA, Homme moved further away from the metal influences that defined his first band but continued to work with heavy, stoner-esque riffs.
As the core member of QOTSA, Homme has recorded eight studio albums as their lead singer, with their third record, Songs for the Deaf, earning them significant praise. With Dave Grohl on drums, the band journey through American highways, using the concept of listeners flicking through radio stations as the basis for the album’s trajectory.
So, when you play the first song, a car door slams shut, the engine is turned on, and the radio is tuned into pummelling riffs and abrasive screams. The band take listeners through stadium-appropriate headbangers, and as a result, Songs for the Deaf has become one of the most revered alternative rock records of all time.
Since then, QOTSA has released further heralded albums, like Lullabies to Paralyze and Era Vulgaris, while Homme has also found success in other bands, such as Them Crooked Vultures and Eagles of Death Metal. Yet, Homme might not have earned the legacy he has come to possess if not for the boldness of the first, self-titled QOTSA album, which he decided to finance entirely himself.
He’d been in Kyuss for eight years and then spent some time touring as a live member of Screaming Trees (Mark Lanegan would, of course, later become a member of Queens of the Stone Age, too). Yet, with QOTSA, Homme was ready for a new creative endeavour. For the band’s debut album, only Homme and Kyuss’ Alfredo Hernández were credited as the sole musicians behind the songs, although additional artists made various contributions.
Homme wanted more creative control than he had before, and this enabled him to develop QOTSA’s signature sound. When asked by Decibel why he chose to finance the whole record himself, he replied: “I didn’t want to – I had been on Elektra records with Kyuss and every time the label never realised that we were never going to give in, and that they should drop it. It was a headbutting relationship. It just felt like, I’ll just make the record I want to make and I won’t have to ask an A&R guy what he thinks because it’ll just be there, and you will be able to say, ‘I like this’ or ‘I think this should be a coaster’ and in that way it’ll be really definitive.”
However, as a result, Homme was drained of much of his income. He added: “It stopped that discussion, that war… but I didn’t really realise I’d be sleeping in my Camaro after that.” Still, he claims that “it was [a] really important time for me.” Despite the challenges, Homme made an album he was proud of, and it paved the way for even bigger and better projects, like QOTSA’s next record, Rated R, which featured several hit tracks like ‘The Lost Art of Keeping A Secret’.
“I never really cared about money or shit like that; I never wanted to be famous; I wanted to make something that could last for a long time,” he concluded.
