{"id":353614,"date":"2026-09-22T15:28:52","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T15:28:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/353614\/"},"modified":"2026-09-22T15:28:52","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T15:28:52","slug":"it-was-trance-robot-music-for-girls-i-wasnt-interested-in-the-guys-at-all-the-birth-of-queens-of-the-stone-age-from-the-ashes-of-kyuss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/353614\/","title":{"rendered":"“It was trance robot music for girls. I wasn’t interested in the guys at all”: the birth of Queens Of The Stone Age from the ashes of Kyuss"},"content":{"rendered":"

For a time, Kyuss<\/a> were arguably the coolest rock band in the world. Metallica<\/a> and Faith No More took the Palm Desert, California band on tour, and Nirvana’s Dave Grohl (later Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl) swears he bought \u201cat least 50 copies\u201d of their 1992 album Blues For The Red Sun<\/a> to share his love for the band with friends. Asked to define his band during a Canadian TV interview in 1992, guitarist Josh Homme<\/a> settled on the description, “a fully escapist trip band.”<\/p>\n

“No politics, no bullshit, no funky costumes,” he stated. “We just play music so you can shut your eyes and forget about all your problems.”<\/p>\n

Three years later however, Kyuss succumbed to their own internal problems – the group dynamic was “fucked”, Homme later said bluntly – and broke up.<\/p>\n

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“We were young kids, boys becoming men, and so the music business was a shocking, strange, foreign, dark and scary place,” drummer Brant Bjork subsequently told this writer. “Business started to dictate what we were doing, and the spirit of creativity and camaraderie and brotherhood \u2013 all that made our band pure and organic \u2013 started to evaporate.”<\/p>\n

Latest Videos From Louder<\/p>\n

In the wake of split, Josh Homme was of a mind to quit the music industry, and, after relocating to Seattle, he enrolled at the University of Washington to study business. But, inevitably, he was drawn back into the game, first joining Screaming Trees<\/a> as their touring guitarist for Lollapalooza 1996 – an experience that would prove educational in more ways than one<\/a> – then, after moving back home to California, founding a new project, Gamma Ray, with assistance from Screaming Trees Van Connor and Masters Of Reality frontman Chris Goss. When German power metal band Gamma Ray stepped in to stop the band trading under their name, Homme’s new band became Queens Of The Stone Age. Starting over afresh, he admitted, “made me scared, cautious and bold at the same time<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

It would have been all too easy for Homme to re-emerge into the spotlight – or, more accurately the one bare bulb underground rock community – with an album which built upon the cult success that his former band had enjoyed. Instead, he took a left turn, eschewing stoner rock fuzz for something altogether lither, more abstract and sexier. In doing so, he set the foundations for what is undeniably one of the most distinctive catalogues in modern music.<\/p>\n

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Queens of the Stone Age – Regular John (Official Audio) – YouTube
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From its opening moments \u2013 the pounding one chord riff augmented with teasing, trebly guitar volume swells which introduces Regular John \u2013 Queens Of The Stone Age, the band’s debut album, released on September 22, 1998, offers a new vocabulary for rock \u2018n\u2019 roll. When it emerged on Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard\u2019s Loosegroove label it sounded fresh, visceral and original, the work of a rock band like no other, which was entirely the point.<\/p>\n

Though it didn\u2019t drop from a clear blue sky (the influence of The Stooges<\/a> is immediately apparent, as is the forceful Motorik drive imported from Krautrock heroes Can and Neu!<\/a>) Homme\u2019s desire to fashion rock music \u201cheavy enough for the boys and sweet enough for the girls\u201d ensure that the album has an altogether more feminine sensibility than most modern rock releases, not least in Homme\u2019s decidedly un-macho vocals and in the swing imparted by Alfredo Hernadez\u2019s drums. <\/p>\n

“I wanted to do something for girls,” Homme told The Guardian. “The way I thought about it was trance robot music for girls. I wasn’t interested in the guys at all. I wanted to make something that girls could dance to that really had a freedom that Kyuss didn’t. By the end, Kyuss felt restrictive. I’d lived my whole life in Kyuss since I was a boy, and we had all these rules that were based on what you couldn’t do. And I wanted a new set of rules based on what you could.”<\/p>\n

The opening tracks on Homme’s new declaration of independence could hardly be stronger. Regular John, an unsettling tale of obsession and dark desires, is all insistent, propulsive groove, Avon \u2013 originally recorded with Monster Magnet\u2019s John Paul McBain and Soundgarden\u2019s Ben Shepherd for the third release in Homme\u2019s Desert Sessions series \u2013 builds and climbs on a stepped Led Zeppelin<\/a>-esque riff, and the tambourine-heavy If Only \u2013 with its conscious echoes of The Stooges I Wanna be Your Dog \u2013 is a stripped-back tale of love gone askew. <\/p>\n

From this elevated platform, Homme sprawls out in different directions, from the lo-fi rumble of How To Handle A Rope through the hazy narcotic surrealism of Mexicola and its depiction of a world \u201cfull of shit and gasoline\u201d to the bouncing, off-kilter swing of the instrumental Hispanic Impressions. Perhaps most striking of all is You Can\u2019t Quit Me Baby, a song which inverts the title of Willie Dixon\u2019s blues classic (later re-interpreted by Led Zeppelin on their debut album), and develops into a dark stalker fantasy (\u201cFollowed you home, crawled in your window, This life is a trip when you\u2019re psycho in love\u201d) while simultaneously skewering fragile male egos. <\/p>\n

For other bands, a collection of this quality might well be be a career high, but in truth, as brilliant as it is, Queens Of The Stone Age isn\u2019t even in the top three QOTSA albums. That this is the case speaks highly to Josh Homme\u2019s restless, inquisitive spirit and his constant desire to re-mould and evolve his band\u2019s sound. But as debut albums go, Queens Of The Stone Age is commanding and bold, both a razing of the past and a signpost pointing towards new horizons. It still sounds like the beginning of something very special.<\/p>\n

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The latest news, features and interviews direct to your inbox, from the global home of alternative music.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For a time, Kyuss were arguably the coolest rock band in the world. Metallica and Faith No More…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":353615,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-353614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353614\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/353615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}