The Queens of the Stone Age album Josh Homme thought would be their last: “I’m not going to repeat myself”
Rock and roll has a habit of making its stars come and go relatively quickly.
Burning fast and bright, they come in to dominate an era before leaving swiftly with the changing tides of cultural trends, dominated by future stars. That’s never happened to Josh Homme, though, who has been a constant of rock creativity since the 1980s.
It all began with Kyuss, a band who moulded all of his hard rock and metal influences that he had garnered as a kid, living in the vast expanse of the Californian desert. While American rock was in a limbo period, waving goodbye to the classic sensibilities that came before them, and slowly hurtling towards a period of grunge supremacy, led by Homme’s Seattle-based friends, he used the cultural confusion to capture a zeitgeist of his own.
The bands’ unique stoner rock identity blended heavy, downtuned riffs with psychedelic and punk-influenced grooves to capture something wholly transformational. For all intents and purposes, it was the band that would thrust Homme to global fame.
But the key to achieving the sort of career longevity that Homme has is understanding adaptability. Inspired by Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life, the Californian rocker realised his musical destiny awaited elsewhere, under the formation of an entirely different band that would drop the stoner groove and focus more solidly on melodic hooks, faster tempos and more discernible choruses.
Queens of the Stone Age marked a more commercial proposition for Homme, a band under which he could hit the glittering heights of rock fame that inspired him to pick up a guitar in the first place. But ultimately, Homme had his career mapped out and was incessant in eluding the trappings of artistic predictability to a point where he knew exactly how many albums Queens would deliver.
He explained, “When I first started the band and doing the first record, I was like, ‘this is the first of three.’ I wanted to move away from Kyuss and not be pigeonholed; identify a new sound. But I didn’t want to lose all of those fans because I liked those people, you know? I wanted to expand, but ease in slowly to the idea. I’m not going to repeat myself forever.”
Adding, “So the first record, I started the evolution slowly. Then the second one, Rated R, fanned it out some more. Get a little more bizarre. And the third, Songs For the Deaf, brought back the hard edge but expanded the sound even more. Now I’m off on a new direction and not everyone is with me, but as an artist these days, you really can’t do what people expect you to do.”
While Queens ultimately made another record after Songs For The Deaf, Homme made good on his promise to pivot. Collaborations with Eagles of Death Metal and the formation of the ultimate super group Them Crooked Vultures soon followed, as well as a foray into producing the likes of Arctic Monkeys and his true idol, Iggy Pop, which ultimately rubber-stamped his immortal place in the music industry.
