Queens of the Stone Age’s ‘Perfecth’

“I throw myself upon the tracks.” John Homme sings at the jagged, forlorn beginning of the ninth Queens of the Stone Age album. It’s just him and his acoustic guitar, and to drive home those lyrics we hear the sound of an elevated train rushing by, as if we’re sitting with him in his lonely apartment on the worst part of town, a down-on-his-luck dude truly starting over. Indeed, Homme has had his struggles, including a messy public divorce, a child custody battle, and a recent cancer-related surgery. On Perfecth, he tries to build something new inside his wreckage. It’s his band’s most subdued and introspective work; where Queens’ last album, 2023’s In Times New Roman…saw him strike out against the world while offering a nuanced, grown-up take on the kind of sleek hard-rock that made QOTSA rep, this album sounds like it’s designed for brooding bedrooms not loud arenas.

“Phantom Limb” is like an acoustic X-ray of a heavy-rock tune, with Homme singing about trying to pilot friendless isolation. He breaks out his best decadent English-rocker warble for acoustic songs like “From the Cliff” and “Easy Street,” as he wonders about the weird ins and outs of trying to trust new relationships. The latter song comes with a lyric that analogizes his experience to being “punched in the face” by bad luck, an unfortunate metaphor for someone who’s been accused of domestic violence by his ex-wife, Brody Dalle of the Distillers.

The stuff that works here manages to blast past personal malaise with music that rocks. “Sunday” ties his best Bowie voice to a slithering Iggy Pop-style track as Homme sings about searching for solace in a cold world. “I’m a wreck, what did you expect,” he admits. With its low-slung riff and stuttering stomping groove “Where the Goth Girls At” breaks past its less-than-promising title to deliver gutter-glam thrills. “Insignificant Other” is a Seventies Stones stroll backing lyrics that pick through the smoldering embers of a past he can’t rewrite. “We all make plans until life gets in the way and there’s nothing left of us to hold onto,” Homme sings, sounding genuinely depleted. He hasn’t always come off as the most sympathetic figure during his myriad personal upheavals, but here the sense of honest reckoning feels earned. It’s enough to make you hope he finds his way up off the mat.