For nearly three decades and across nine albums, Queens of the Stone Age founder Josh Homme has wielded amazing songs and killer riffs, started a pickup band with John Paul Jones and Dave Grohl, blown perfect smoke rings while Iggy Pop showers him with onstage platitudes and generally lived his life as Rock’s Most Interesting Man (forget that Dos Equis-peddling codger). But we’ve also watched his divorce and child-custody battle play out in public, the look of fear on his face when a close friend came close to death during an onstage terrorist attack and the artistic aftermath he arrived upon (the 2025 mini-LP Alive in the Catacombs) while grappling with his own personal cancer diagnosis.
That epiphanic realization is the basis for Perfecth (Matador). There are no fist-pumping anthems, blister-raising leads or Homme’s cool-AF braggadocio at play here. It’s all been replaced with a great sense of humility and introspection spread across little more than half an hour. Oftentimes, the proceedings feel like the listener is part of the audio-verite process (“It’s Only Love”) or out in the Palm Springs desert, eavesdropping on Homme’s progress.
Perfecth also acts as a time machine where Homme has dimmed the dials to the ’70s and snapped them clean off. It starts with “Insignificant Other,” whose title and electric piano propulsion feel like an homage to Atlanta Rhythm Section’s 1978 hit “Imaginary Lover” and shares that song’s unhealthy yearning. Homme proceeds to lead his band into the semi-avant-prog of “Mono”, which approximates supergroup legends Blind Faith jamming with film-score auteur Ennio Morricone. But then he breaks out “From the Cliff,” a forlorn, acoustic Laurel Canyon paean to an ex-lover whom he begs to “keep your head down, don’t turn around, don’t make a sound” as they walk away forever.
The minimal, click-track-flamenco of the Nikki Lane-featuring “Easy Street” is probably most revealing. When Homme admits, “the sound of your voice and the things that you say / ’just shut up and fuck me’ or ‘shut up and go away’/ you drive me crazy, for sure / but I can do that myself,” he reveals some haunted dichotomy. He acknowledges advice that “violence is not the answer,” even toward “people who need punched in the face,” but swears that honestly, he’s changed. “I don’t believe in luck / so you can have mine,” he offers prior to a swelling guitar solo that would make Robert Fripp or Bill Nelson call their respective attorneys.
If there’s an M.O. on Perfecth, it’s that maybe trying to hold on to one’s sense of potency (read: “cool’) well into middle age is some wack, psychic taxidermy. These days, any QWERTY kitten can load a chosen scenario into ChatGPT and start their solo career tomorrow. Homme built his in real life and hung in long enough to realize all the anguish he accumulated was actually perfect — for him. Whether Perfecth is a liberating exercise in artistic freedom or an outright fanbase-annihilation maneuver remains to be seen. But fuck, man: why wouldn’t you stick around for what’s next?
