Queens of the Stone Age prove rock can still win by being strange

What does a rock band do after three decades, when nobody is waiting for a reinvention and everybody is waiting for a greatest-hits tour? If you're Queens of the Stone Age, apparently you release a nine-song album, call it Perfecth, build it around the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold, and close it with a letter from a father to his eldest son. That is not the safe move. It's the interesting one.

The facts are modest; the choices are not

Perfecth, the band's ninth album, came out October 30 on Matador Records. It runs about 36 minutes, which Billboard notes is the shortest of their career. It was preceded by "Easy Street," "Insignificant Other" and "Where the Goth Girls At?", and then by the fourth single, "Run Away From the Mob," the closing track.

That closer was originally recorded in 2013 with Dave Grohl on drums. Josh Homme says in the band's statement that the songs weren't finished until now because, in his words, "I wasn't qualified to finish them, yet." The song, he says, is "a letter" to an oldest son, and the end is "the sound of a father standing behind his son." Consequence describes it as stripped-down and mellow until the 2:45 mark, when drums and guitars get loud for the final minute.

Holding back the noise is the boldest thing here

Think about the choice. A band known for stoner-rock muscle puts out a final single that waits almost three minutes before it hits hard. That's patience, and patience is exactly what the streaming-era single usually punishes. In our view it's also why the rollout worked: each of the four singles seemed to point somewhere different, with critics calling "Easy Street" "psychedelic" and "decidedly surreal," "Where the Goth Girls At?" "a bruising bass-led feast of rock debauchery," and "Insignificant Other" a "deliciously callous kiss-off." Homme himself says every song sounds like it's from a different world, and that this is on purpose.

Anticipation, we think, doesn't come from reassurance. It comes from not knowing what the next track will be. A band that releases four singles that sound like the same record has told you everything. A band that gives you a falsetto kiss-off, a bass-led romp and a quiet farewell letter makes you want the whole thing in order.

Age isn't the obstacle; repetition is

The most persuasive detail is how the album was made. Sessions ran from New Orleans to Los Angeles, and old material, including that 2013 track, was brought back. Homme describes a "very raw, very natural sounding" record, played largely with everyone in the same room, "very much like the '70s." Billboard says it flirts with art rock, jazz, folk and country blues. Pitchfork calls it some of their most relaxed and spacious music in years.

There's a lesson for legacy rock acts here. Recycling a golden-era sound is the easy bet, and it's the one that makes a new album feel like a souvenir. Reopening unfinished work, changing cities and letting the songs diverge is riskier, but it gives a reason to exist beyond the back catalog. Whether every song lands is a separate question, and not everyone is sold: VICE's review calls the record "a little unremarkable" by the band's standards, while still granting that the five-piece lock in on several moments. That split is healthy. An album that everyone calls safe gets no argument, and an album people argue about gets replayed.

One caveat worth keeping in mind: the "kintsugi" framing is the band's own, and a concept can be a marketing coat of gold over ordinary cracks. We'd rather judge the music than the metaphor. But the metaphor at least commits to something, and so does a tour that starts May 1, 2027 in San Diego with Pixies on the bill.

Verdict: listen to it in order, and argue about it

Guitar bands don't need to prove they're still relevant; they need to prove they're still curious. Perfecth is short, odd and personal, and it doesn't ask for your nostalgia. Our recommendation: skip the single-by-single approach, play it front to back with the closer as the payoff, and decide for yourself whether the strangeness is earned. If the debate is anything to go by, it's the best argument for veteran rock albums we've seen this year.