Perfecth: Queens Of The Stone Age let the cracks show

Perfecth is a love record with the shine taken off. Queens Of The Stone Age's ninth is quiet where it needs to be and ugly where it counts, and Josh Homme spends most of it in a register that sounds like a man telling you something he has not said out loud before. Nothing here is built to fill a field the way 'Go With The Flow' was. Across nine tracks the band picks the small damage over the big gesture.

Homme formed the band in Palm Desert in 1996, after Kyuss came apart, and he has been its only constant member since. The current line-up of Troy Van Leeuwen, Michael Shuman, Dean Fertita and Jon Theodore has held together since 2013, which for this band counts as stability. That stretch produced a loose trilogy: ...Like Clockwork in 2013, Villains in 2017, In Times New Roman... in 2023. Perfecth opens whatever comes next, and it lands three years after the last one, after Homme said he had no intention of making anyone wait another six.

Shuman co-produced with Homme, and the two built the record over several years and through a bad run: Homme's divorce, a cancer fight, an unspecified emergency surgery. The organising idea is kintsugi, the Japanese repair that leaves the crack showing, and the arrangements follow it, with overdriven outros and endings that come apart on purpose. Before any of it was announced, the band cut an acoustic set in the Paris Catacombs in July 2024 and released it as Alive In The Catacombs the following year, with 'Insignificant Other' buried at the end of the film. The album is out October 30 on Matador, after four singles, the first of them 'Easy Street' with Nikki Lane.

'It's Only Love' opens on train horns and swirling wind, adds a string section near the end, and finishes on the line about a twisted rope and hanging on, then goes violent. The song carries a blade, and the band mostly keeps it out of sight for the rest of the record.

'Insignificant Other' is the catchiest thing here and runs almost six minutes, and its wordplay carries the length for a while. 'Where The Goth Girls At?' is the one straight rock cut: a dark, heavy riff, Jon Theodore's drumming driving it, a distorted overdriven outro behind Homme yelling 'So don't chase them all away.'

'Mono' is the best song on the record and the most unnerving. The panning is built for headphones, and the ending is a nightmare: a vocal that sounds like someone waking up inside it. 'From The Cliff' gives you room to recover, hung on the line 'all we have to do is a leap of faith from the cliff of love into the blue', and it is the most direct thing Homme has written in years. 'Sunday' is an Iggy Pop song from 2016's Post-Pop Depression, done here with a straight face. 'Easy Street' is the one that grins: clapping percussion, a major key, falsetto, and a joke that lands. 'Run Away From The Mob' closes with Dave Grohl on drums, his only appearance on the album, Homme wailing over the top about mob mentality and the work of not hating yourself.

It is for people who stayed through Villains and wanted the ...Like Clockwork band back, and for anyone who assumes a love album has to be tender. It sits closer to Bowie's late-seventies run than to Kyuss, closer to a singer at a microphone than a band on a stage. You get two real riffs, 'Goth Girls' and the outro of 'Mob'. The rest of the time you are being asked to sit still, and the record gives back more for that than it does for volume.

The flaw is where the length sits. 'Insignificant Other' is both the catchiest song and the longest, and its final stretch spends momentum the album cannot spare. The same song at four minutes would land harder. 'Sunday' is the other soft spot: it tells you nothing about the record around it, and it breaks the best run on the album just as that run was building.

Four out of five. Perfecth is the warmest and least certain Queens Of The Stone Age have sounded, and the uncertainty is doing the work: cracks left in, the pot still holding.