{"id":379530,"date":"2026-10-22T10:04:23","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T10:04:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/379530\/"},"modified":"2026-10-22T10:04:23","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T10:04:23","slug":"the-women-on-the-cover-of-queens-of-the-stone-ages-debut-album","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/379530\/","title":{"rendered":"The women on the cover of Queens of the Stone Age\u2019s debut album"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/p>\n

Credit: Far Out \/ Album Covers<\/p>\n

October 22nd, 2026 \u00b7 10:00am BST <\/p>\n

\u201cThe Kings of the Stone Age wear armour and have axes and wrestle. The Queens of the Stone Age<\/a> hang out with the Kings of the Stone Age\u2019s girlfriends when they wrestle\u2026\u201d frontman Josh Homme once said of the origins of his band\u2019s name.<\/p>\n

\u201cRock should be heavy enough for the boys and sweet enough for the girls,\u201d Homme continued. \u201cThat way everyone\u2019s happy, and it\u2019s more of a party. Kings of the Stone Age is too lopsided.\u201d <\/p>\n

From its inception, then, Queens of the Stone Age attempted to find some sort of balance: one that would prompt anyone to listen, would strike one chord or another, and would return guitar music to its core. And, at 25 years old, Josh Homme set out to do so.<\/p>\n

Queens of the Stone Age formed from the ashes of Kyuss, the pivotal stoner rock band that disbanded in 1995. Its members went on to form or join numerous bands: Fu Manchu, Dwarves, Mondo Generator and more. Homme, meanwhile, joined Screaming Trees<\/a> as their touring guitarist and formed a band, Gamma Ray, who released a self-titled EP in 1996. <\/p>\n

Then, forced to change their name after a German power metal band, also called Gamma Ray, threatened to sue, Queens of the Stone Age was born, with Homme alongside his former Kyuss bandmate Alfredo Hern\u00e1ndez. Two years later, their eponymous debut album would be unleashed.<\/p>\n

The original artwork for Queens of the Stone Age was laid out by Homme, in collaboration with graphic artist Frank Kozik. Reminiscent of an image one would find on the cover of an erotic science-fiction thriller in the 1970s, the album\u2019s full cover is a photograph of a woman dressed in leather, posing semi-nude against a bright red motorcycle<\/a> (the official cover is cropped for censorship, but the full photograph was included in the vinyl\u2019s gatefold). Behind her is a mountainous landscape and a sky turned galaxy, with dark purple clouds, stars and an orange moon. The band\u2019s name is emblazoned in a font akin to the logos of Back to the Future or Star Wars. <\/p>\n

\u201cI was part of the trash world. I was a no-education loser person, and was definitely into hedonistic experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n

Frank Kozik<\/p>\n

The design was perfectly suited to Kozik\u2019s style: provocation met with a certain darkness. He told Riot Fest<\/a> in 2018, noting his preference for punk rock shows over museums or academia, with an emphasis on lived realities, \u201cIt was all stuff that we could kind of reproduce in our own lives; we could get a shitty car and drive around real fast, and we could hang out with fun people and party\u2026 and a lot of that stuff is really visually arresting. It\u2019s all power imagery, and it really gets basic impulses across: sex, drugs, violence, weird shit.\u201d<\/p>\n

The unknown woman\u2019s photograph captured everything that Queens of the Stone Age were to represent: sex, danger and adrenaline echoed in every chord, bass line and drum beat<\/a>. From the opening whine of guitars on the album\u2019s opener, \u2018Regular John\u2019, we are led into a world both sinister and strangely enticing: \u201cWho are you, girl?\u201d Homme asks, \u201c\u2018Cause I\u2019m so bored with myself.\u201d <\/p>\n

On a song like \u2018Give the Mule What He Wants\u2019, the tumbling opening riff and the harmonies that echo behind it evoke the image of driving in a near-empty desert, with nothing but the unknown blazing ahead.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The bones of Kyuss\u2019s formative stoner rock sound remain in Queens of the Stone Age\u2019s skeleton, but there is more to it: a certain groove that provokes the listener to move and, on their debut in particular, there is a primal simplicity in its execution that strips the guitars to their purest form while remaining as entrancing as ever.<\/p>\n

Queens of the Stone Age was released on vinyl with the celestial-meets-biker pin-up photograph adorning it, pressed in three colours (black, green and orange) at only 3,000 copies total, released on Kozik\u2019s label, Man\u2019s Ruin Records. However, when the CD release came along that year \u2013 on Loosegroove Records in the United States and Roadrunner in the United Kingdom \u2013 an alternative photograph was used: a nude photograph of Trinidadian-British model <\/a>Sylvia Bayo from the 1972 book The Pin-Up: A Modest History by Mark Gabor. <\/p>\n

For the CD\u2019s cover, the photograph of Bayo was cropped to centre her stomach and waist, and this would become the more widely circulated and better known of the two album covers. The original vinyl and its cover art continue to sell for hundreds, if not thousands, a rarity circulating among resellers, but it was reissued in 2022, with Kozik\u2019s art and the initial vinyl sequence. <\/p>\n

ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE \"\"\/ <\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: Far Out \/ Album Covers October 22nd, 2026 \u00b7 10:00am BST \u201cThe Kings of the Stone Age…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":379531,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[5278,139288,133980,2468,5006,9,24,63,3419,122,124,123,2856,134366],"class_list":["post-379530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-1990s","tag-139288","tag-desert-rock","tag-homepage","tag-josh-homme","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-photography","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news","tag-queens-of-the-stone-age","tag-the-cover-uncovered"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379530","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=379530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379530\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}