The story of Queens of the Stone Age

Kids of the desert and the Kyuss years

The story of Queens of the Stone Age starts with one man, Joshua Michael Homme the third, born in Palm Springs, California, on the seventeenth of May 1973. He grew up around Palm Desert, in a family that had been in the valley for generations. His grandfather Cap Homme was an early settler, and there is still a private street named after him. Young Josh wanted a drum kit, but his parents said no, so at nine he picked up a guitar instead. His teacher was mostly interested in polka, and Josh later said he did not learn about barre chords or even a pick until his third year of lessons. That odd schooling is one reason his playing never sounded like anybody else's.[1] [2]

In 1987, when Josh was fourteen, he started a band at Palm Desert High School with schoolmates John Garcia, Brant Bjork, Nick Oliveri and Chris Cockrell. They called it Katzenjammer, then Sons of Kyuss, after a monster from Dungeons and Dragons, and finally just Kyuss. There were no all ages rock clubs in the desert, so they played what locals called generator parties. Somebody hauled a gas generator out into the sand, somebody else brought beer, and bands played long, loud sets under the stars until, now and then, the police turned up. Homme later said the desert shaped the band, because the crowd played for free and would tell you to your face if you were bad.[1] [2] [3]

Kyuss drove into Los Angeles to play and often ended up in fights with the hair metal crowd. At one of those shows a producer named Chris Goss, leader of the band Masters of Reality, saw them and was floored. He heard a giant, low rumble that came from Homme playing his guitar through bass amplifiers, tuned way down. Goss swore no metal producer would ruin that sound, and he produced their records from 1992 onward, starting with Blues for the Red Sun. Homme was still under eighteen when the band signed its deal, so his parents had to sign the contract for him. Kyuss opened shows for Metallica in Australia, and Dave Grohl became a fan.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The band kept shedding members. Oliveri left after Blues for the Red Sun and was replaced on bass by Scott Reeder. Drummer Brant Bjork quit after Welcome to Sky Valley, and Alfredo Hernández took his place. Kyuss released their last album, And the Circus Leaves Town, in July 1995, and split up that summer. They never had a hit in their lifetime, but their reputation kept growing, and critics came to call them pioneers of stoner rock, a label Homme never liked. He told a writer that when you are at the peak, you should snip it and end it rather than let it slide downhill. He would soon need a new band.[1] [2] [3]

Seattle, Gamma Ray and a new name

After Kyuss ended, Homme moved to Seattle and briefly studied business at a community college, not sure he wanted a music career at all. Old friends pulled him back in. In 1996 he joined the grunge band Screaming Trees as a touring rhythm guitarist on the Lollapalooza tour, and there he became close friends with their singer, Mark Lanegan. He also spent a few months living in a squat in Amsterdam. A Dutch connection led to the very first song under a new banner, 18 A.D., recorded with guitarist Dave Catching and members of the Dutch band Beaver for a Roadrunner Records compilation of stoner music.[1] [2] [3]

Homme's new project first went by the name Gamma Ray, and in 1996 it released an EP recorded with Van Conner of Screaming Trees and drummer Victor Indrizzo. Then a German power metal band called Gamma Ray threatened to sue. So in 1997 Homme reached back for a joke Chris Goss had once made about Kyuss, calling them the Queens of the Stone Age. Homme liked it because it felt less macho. Kings, he said, would wear armour and wrestle, while Queens would hang out with the Kings' girlfriends. His idea was music heavy enough for the boys and sweet enough for the girls. He later summed up the whole plan as trance robot music for girls.[1] [2] [3]

Queens of the Stone Age played their first public show on the sixth of September 1997 at CBGB in New York, on a showcase bill with Monster Magnet and Fu Manchu. Their first proper headline gig came on the twentieth of November 1997 at the OK Hotel in Seattle. That December a split EP came out, three Kyuss songs on one side and three Queens songs on the other. Then Homme went home to the desert. In April 1998 he recorded the debut album at Monkey Studios in Palm Desert with Alfredo Hernández on drums. Homme played nearly everything else, crediting his bass to an alter ego called Carlo Von Sexron.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Homme had never meant to be the singer. He later wrote that two days before recording he still had another vocalist, a talented musician with a different vision, and the only way to make his own idea work was to step up himself. He said you can hear on that first record that he did not want the job. The album came out on the twenty second of September 1998 on Loosegroove, the label run by Pearl Jam's Stone Gossard. Soon after the sessions, his old Kyuss friend Nick Oliveri joined on bass, with Dave Catching on guitar and keyboards. Suddenly the touring band was made up entirely of Kyuss veterans and road crew.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The road was rowdy from the start. On the tenth of July 1999, while touring in London, Oliveri and Homme got into a scuffle with the English band Terrorvision. Oliveri was arrested and released a few hours later without charge. By then Hernández had left to play in other desert bands, and the drum stool would change hands again and again. Homme had a plan that he later described clearly. He saw the first three albums as a set. The first would put distance between him and Kyuss, the second would fan the music out in new directions, and the third would push it further still. The second record was next.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rated R and the big break

Rated R came out on the sixth of June 2000, the band's first album for the major label Interscope. It brought in a crowd of friends, including Mark Lanegan, drummers Gene Trautmann and Nick Lucero, and Chris Goss as co producer. The opening track, Feel Good Hit of the Summer, is little more than a chant of drug names. Homme said he wrote it stumbling through the desert after a New Year's party, trying to remember what he had taken. By pure luck, Judas Priest singer Rob Halford was recording in the studio next door, and he stepped in to sing backing vocals on the final chorus.[1] [2] [3]

The drug references caused trouble. Some radio stations refused to play Feel Good Hit of the Summer, and Walmart threatened to pull the album unless it carried a warning. Interscope also worried about a parental advisory sticker. The band answered with the artwork itself. The cover copies an old film rating card and says the record is restricted to everyone, everywhere, all the time. The liner notes list mock warnings for each song, like alcohol and sleep deprivation. That packaging did the job, and the album was sold without a sticker. The lead single, The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret, became the band's first real radio breakthrough.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rated R earned the Queens a gold record in Britain and opening slots with the Smashing Pumpkins, Foo Fighters and Hole, plus a place on Ozzfest 2000. Oliveri was becoming the band's wild card. He sang lead on several songs, and on Quick and to the Pointless the whole band was recorded in a single take, with his scratch vocal, including two verses in Dutch, left on the finished record. At Rock in Rio on the nineteenth of January 2001, he played naked except for his bass. Police in Brazil arrested him after the show. He apologised and said he had no idea it was a crime there.[1] [2] [3]

Near the end of the Rated R tour, the band played the Rock am Ring festival in Germany in 2001. Homme later called it the worst show they had ever played, and it was in front of about forty thousand people. Their slot was on a Friday at a quarter past four in the afternoon. To make sure they never forgot it, Homme, Oliveri, Lanegan and their soundman Hutch all got the same tattoo on their ribs, reading Freitag four fifteen. Oliveri explained that he chose the ribs because it would hurt the most. After that tour, Mark Lanegan, whose band Screaming Trees had ended, joined the Queens as a full member.[1] [2] [3]

Songs for the Deaf and a firing

Homme and Dave Grohl had been friends since 1992, when Grohl saw Kyuss in Seattle. Grohl had wanted to play on Rated R, and in late 2001 he finally joined to record the third album. He had not drummed seriously in years. The engineers put him in a small, dead sounding booth and made him play every song twice, once hitting electronic pads instead of cymbals and once with real cymbals over a silenced kit, then blended the takes. Grohl said it was his favourite album he had ever played drums on. He put Foo Fighters on hold to tour with the Queens through much of 2002.[1] [2] [3]

Songs for the Deaf came out on the twenty seventh of August 2002. It works as a loose concept album about the drive from Los Angeles to Joshua Tree, stitched together with fake radio broadcasts from desert towns. Homme said the idea came from long, uncomfortable drives in his Kyuss days, when all you could pick up was Spanish radio. Oliveri said the radio skits were also a dig at stations that never played them. Three singers shared the lead, Homme, Oliveri and Lanegan. The album reached number seventeen in America, went gold, and critics called it the best hard rock record of the year.[1] [2] [3]

The hit was No One Knows. Its main riff came from an older Desert Sessions track, and Homme said the song had been kicking around for about five years. Michel Gondry directed a video in which Homme, Oliveri and Lanegan hit a deer on a desert road, and the deer takes revenge by driving off with them strapped to the hood. The song topped Australia's Triple J Hottest 100 for 2002, and it earned a Grammy nomination. For a stretch in late 2002 and early 2003, Grohl held the top of the American modern rock chart for seventeen out of eighteen weeks, with Nirvana, Foo Fighters and the Queens in turn.[1] [2] [3]

Grohl left after the summer of 2002, and former Danzig drummer Joey Castillo replaced him. The story goes that there was no real audition. Halfway through a song at a last minute rehearsal, Homme walked out, came back and said he had just fired the drummer and the tour started tomorrow. Castillo stayed ten years. Guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen, who had played in Failure and A Perfect Circle, also joined for the tour, beating other players at the audition. He had one week to learn thirty songs. The tour ended with headline dates in Australia in January 2004, and then the band blew apart.[1] [2] [3]

After those Australian shows, Homme fired Nick Oliveri, his friend since childhood. Homme later told BBC Radio One that he had once confronted Oliveri about a rumour that he had been physically abusive to his girlfriend, warning that if it ever proved true he could no longer know him. He also mentioned a later incident in England involving Oliveri and Lanegan. Oliveri hit back in the press, saying the band had been poisoned by a hunger for power and would be Queens Lite without him. Homme seriously considered ending the band. That same year Homme himself was arrested for assaulting Dwarves singer Blag Dahlia and another man at a Los Angeles club. He pleaded no contest and was sentenced to probation, community service and sixty days of rehab.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Lullabies, Era Vulgaris and a loss

Homme rebuilt around Van Leeuwen, Castillo and multi instrumentalist Alain Johannes of the band Eleven, with Lanegan still singing when his own tours and his health allowed. The new album, Lullabies to Paralyze, took its title from a line in Mosquito Song, the hidden last track on Songs for the Deaf. Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top played on it, and Homme described it as dark, full of fairy tale imagery inspired by the Brothers Grimm. It came out on the twenty second of March 2005 and debuted at number five in America, selling ninety seven thousand copies in its first week, the band's best start so far.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the fourteenth of May 2005 the Queens were the musical guests on Saturday Night Live, hosted by Will Ferrell. When they played Little Sister, Ferrell walked out as Gene Frenkle, his cowbell player from the famous Blue Öyster Cult sketch, and banged along. The joke worked because the song already had a cowbell sound, which on the record was actually Castillo playing a jam block. That year the band toured with Nine Inch Nails and put out a live DVD. In December, at the Wiltern in Los Angeles, old Kyuss singer John Garcia joined them onstage for three Kyuss songs, the first time he and Homme had played together since 1997.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Homme's private life was in the headlines too. He had first met the Australian punk singer Brody Dalle at Lollapalooza in 1996, when she was dating Rancid's Tim Armstrong. In 2003, during her split from Armstrong, she and Homme got together, and a photo of them kissing in Rolling Stone added fuel to a bitter divorce. Homme said he received death threats from Armstrong's fans. Dalle called Homme the most beautiful man she had ever seen and said he looked like a red haired Elvis. They married on the third of December 2005, and their daughter Camille was born in January 2006.[1] [2] [3]

Era Vulgaris followed on the twelfth of June 2007. Homme said the title sounded like the vulgar era, which he liked, and he described the record as dark, hard and electrical, like a construction worker. It was produced by Homme and Chris Goss, and Julian Casablancas of the Strokes turned up on Sick, Sick, Sick. The band pulled the title track and mailed it to fans with a letter asking them to spread it all over the internet. For the tour, bassist Michael Shuman and keyboardist Dean Fertita joined. Fertita came in through the Queens' soundman Hutch, who had met him on tour with the Raconteurs.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In November 2007 the band played a semi acoustic show deep underground in a salt mine in Sondershausen, Germany, but the film never came out. In June 2008, at a festival in Oslo, someone threw a shoe at Homme and he answered with a stream of abuse that included a homophobic slur. He was accused of homophobia and denied it in an open letter that critics found clumsy at best. Then came a real loss. On the second of July 2008, Natasha Shneider, Johannes's wife and the band's former keyboardist, died of cancer. The Queens played a benefit in her memory in Los Angeles that August with PJ Harvey and Tenacious D.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Side roads, lawsuits and the fog

After the Era Vulgaris tour ended at Reading and Leeds in August 2008, the band scattered into side projects. Homme produced most of Arctic Monkeys' album Humbug, and in 2009 he formed a supergroup with Dave Grohl on drums and Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones on bass. They called it Them Crooked Vultures. Their first show was at midnight at the Metro in Chicago on the ninth of August 2009, their album arrived that November, and in 2011 their song New Fang won the Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance. Meanwhile Fertita joined Jack White in the Dead Weather, and Van Leeuwen started his own band, Sweethead.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Around 2010 Homme had what he first described as routine knee surgery. He told NME he died on the table, and he later told Marc Maron that he had choked on oxygen tubes and had to be revived. The real problem was a MRSA infection his body could not fight. He was stuck in bed for months with tubes in his leg and sank into a deep depression, unable to write music and wondering whether to quit. He credited Transcendental Meditation with pulling him through. In the end he invited his bandmates into what he called the fog with him, and that shared darkness became the next album.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Old friends were having hard times too. On the twelfth of July 2011, Nick Oliveri was arrested on suspicion of felony domestic violence after a four hour standoff with a police SWAT team at his Los Angeles home. His girlfriend said he had hit her the day before. He let her leave after two hours and surrendered two hours later, and police found a loaded rifle inside. In 2012 he pleaded guilty to a single count of cocaine possession, and the other felony counts were dropped. Oliveri later said he had no excuse, but insisted he had never meant to keep her in the house against her will.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Kyuss came back to haunt Homme as well. In late 2010 Garcia, Bjork and Oliveri announced they would tour as Kyuss Lives, without him. In March 2012 Homme, joined by former bassist Scott Reeder, filed a federal lawsuit against Garcia and Bjork for trademark infringement and consumer fraud. Bjork shot back that he had named the band in the first place and accused Homme of wanting control and money. That August a judge ruled they could keep playing concerts under the name but could not release recordings as Kyuss Lives. By November they had renamed themselves Vista Chino. Oliveri, who had quit the reunion, said lawsuits kill music.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Recording finally began in August 2012, but it was a tough session. Homme compared it to spelunking in a dark, deep cave. About a third of the way in, he fired Joey Castillo, his drummer of ten years, and refused to say why. In November he told the BBC that Dave Grohl would play drums on the record. Castillo still appears on some songs, and new drummer Jon Theodore, formerly of the Mars Volta, played on the closing title track. Former members came back as guests, with Oliveri and Lanegan singing backing vocals. The title came from the band's dark running joke that every setback arrived just like clockwork.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Number one, Paris and Villains

Elton John ended up on the album almost by accident. His assistant happened to be Homme's old roommate, played the Queens to Elton on a long car ride, and passed along the number. When Elton rang, Homme thought a friend was pranking him. Elton told him the band needed an actual queen, and he played piano on Fairweather Friends, four days after Homme had fired his drummer. Like Clockwork came out on Matador Records on the fourth of June 2013 in America. It debuted at number one with ninety one thousand copies, the band's first American chart topper and the first ever for Matador, knocking Daft Punk off the top.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Like Clockwork earned three Grammy nominations, and in January 2014 the band performed at the Grammys with Trent Reznor, Lindsey Buckingham and Dave Grohl. Jon Theodore became the full time drummer, and as of 2026 he is the longest serving drummer the band has had. There was a thaw with Oliveri too. Homme said the two had quietly been friends again since a couple of weeks after the firing. In April 2014, in Portland, Oliveri joined the Queens onstage for the first time in about a decade to sing You Think I Ain't Worth a Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire, and that October he joined them again at a Halloween show at the Forum in Los Angeles.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the thirteenth of November 2015, Homme's other band, Eagles of Death Metal, was playing the Bataclan theatre in Paris when Islamist gunmen stormed the show. About ninety people were killed in the venue. Homme was not there, but his friends were. Singer Jesse Hughes escaped out the back, and guitarist Dave Catching hid in a small bathroom until police got him out. Among the dead was Nick Alexander, the thirty six year old British man who ran the band's merchandise table. Hughes said people died because they would not leave their friends. U2 later invited the band onstage in Paris, and Homme asked musicians everywhere to cover their song I Love You All the Time to raise money for victims.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Homme later said the attack changed the way he did everything and taught him not to wait. In 2016 he and Dean Fertita made the album Post Pop Depression with Iggy Pop, and toured it with Van Leeuwen and Arctic Monkeys drummer Matt Helders. Then came Villains, produced by Mark Ronson and released on the twenty fifth of August 2017. Homme said he wanted the tight, dry sound of Uptown Funk, and that the record was looser simply because he liked to dance. It was the first Queens album with no guest musicians at all. It reached number three in America and gave the band its first number one in Britain.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the twenty fourth of October 2017 the Queens headlined Madison Square Garden for the first time, and they hid free tickets at three stations along the New York subway's Q line. Weeks later came an ugly night. At the KROQ Almost Acoustic Christmas concert in Inglewood on the ninth of December 2017, Homme kicked the camera of photographer Chelsea Lauren into her face, and she went to hospital. He also cut his own forehead onstage and insulted the crowd. The next day he said he had been lost in the performance, then posted a video apology admitting what he did and saying he had failed his family. The BBC shelved his appearances on the children's show CBeebies Bedtime Stories.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Divorce, grief and In Times New Roman

In 2019 Homme went back to his roots and revived the Desert Sessions, the loose jam series he had started in 1997 at Rancho de la Luna in Joshua Tree. The studio was run by Dave Catching and the late Fred Drake. Volumes eleven and twelve came out that October, with Billy Gibbons, Les Claypool and Warpaint's Stella Mozgawa among the guests. Homme described the sessions as a way to recharge his artistic battery, like going to a craft store and making something from scratch. But his personal life was coming apart. In November 2019 Brody Dalle filed for legal separation, and a month later for divorce, citing his alcohol and drug abuse. He went into rehab.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The divorce turned into a long and painful custody fight. Dalle and Homme accused each other of abuse, and both filed restraining orders. In September 2021, restraining order requests were filed on behalf of their two young sons accusing Homme of physical and verbal abuse and of drinking while driving. Homme's lawyer called the claims categorically false, and two judges denied them. In November 2021 Dalle was found in contempt for withholding their youngest child. In March 2022 a court gave Homme sole legal custody, and in March 2023 he and his family were granted a restraining order against Dalle, after it emerged her boyfriend had forged her signature on the earlier filings.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Then came the deaths. On the twenty second of February 2022, Mark Lanegan died at his home in Killarney, Ireland, at fifty seven. He had survived decades of heroin and alcohol addiction, homelessness and a near fatal bout of COVID the year before, and had been clean for more than a decade. No cause of death was given. Nick Oliveri said the whole Songs for the Deaf era band came to the funeral, and that he and Homme spent it in good spirits remembering their friend. Within two months Homme also lost Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins and his best friend, the director Rio Hackford. He told NME he had grieved eleven deaths in seven years.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Homme was also fighting his own body. In 2022 he was diagnosed with cancer, which he did not name, and had surgery to remove it. That September, Them Crooked Vultures reunited for the Taylor Hawkins tribute concerts at Wembley Stadium and the Forum in Los Angeles, playing one of the Queens' own songs, Long Slow Goodbye. By 2023 Homme had finished rehab and was sober. The new album had been recorded about two and a half years earlier, but it sat unfinished. He said he did not sing it until November 2022 because he was not done living, and was probably afraid.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In Times New Roman came out on the sixteenth of June 2023, six years after Villains, and closed what the band called a trilogy on Matador. It was produced by the band and recorded at Homme's Pink Duck studio in Burbank and at Rick Rubin's Shangri La studio in Malibu. Homme called it a record about acceptance, as brutal as it feels to be alive. Songs like Paper Machete dealt openly with his separation. He joked that the title amused him because the most boring font in the world was named after one of history's greatest empires. Critics heard the band's heaviest and angriest music since Era Vulgaris.[1] [2] [3]

The Catacombs and what came next

The band toured In Times New Roman hard through 2023 and into 2024 on what they called The End Is Nero tour. In July 2024, in the middle of the European leg, Homme's health failed again. The band announced he had to return to the United States immediately for emergency surgery, and they cancelled a string of festival and headline dates. More cancellations followed, and in August they called off the rest of the year so he could receive essential medical care. The nature of the surgery was never made public. The fans who had tickets were told the band hoped to see them again in 2025.[1] [2] [3]

Before he flew home, Homme kept one appointment. On the eighth of July 2024, the band played an acoustic set in the Catacombs of Paris, the old tunnels lined with the bones of millions of Parisians. The city had turned them down more than once, and Homme had dreamed of it for nearly twenty years. It was the first time a band had been given official permission to play there. With a three piece string section, they played stripped down versions of their songs, recorded with no overdubs. The very next day, Homme flew back to America for surgery. Between songs he said that if you are going through hell, keep going.[1] [2] [3]

The concert film Alive in the Catacombs was released on the fifth of June 2025, with a companion documentary showing Homme's medical emergency on that tour. Critics called it starkly beautiful. In October 2025 the band launched The Catacombs Tour, playing historic theatres with strings and new arrangements, and at the very first show they debuted a new song called Easy Street. The tour stretched into the spring of 2026. That summer, Easy Street came out as a single with backing vocals from country singer Nikki Lane. Homme said they recorded it like a demo, with no click track and the mistakes left in, because a life is in its mistakes.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In August 2026 the Queens began opening for Foo Fighters on a North American stadium tour. Dave Grohl said he wanted to honour a lifelong bond that began when he first saw Kyuss in 1992. That month a gory teaser video, with Homme stabbing his own hand in a knife game with Dean Fertita, announced a ninth album called Perfecth, with its release date crossed out and left uncertain as of 2026. Nearly thirty years in, Homme is still the only constant member, backed since 2013 by Van Leeuwen, Shuman, Fertita and Theodore. His idea of heavy rock you can dance to remains the band's calling card.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Queens of the Stone Age

Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri. They were schoolmates in Palm Desert, played together in Katzenjammer and Kyuss, and co wrote most of Rated R and Songs for the Deaf. Homme nicknamed him Pierre Pressure, for talking people into things they should not do. The 2004 firing split them publicly, but Homme said they were friends again within weeks. Oliveri sang on Like Clockwork and rejoined them onstage in 2014, though he admits it took time for both of them to heal.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Josh Homme and Mark Lanegan. They bonded in 1996 when Homme toured with Screaming Trees, and Lanegan became the Queens' dark third voice from Rated R through Lullabies to Paralyze. He kept guesting long after he left, and the two wrote the theme for Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown together. Lanegan's memoir describes bringing Homme along when he went to score drugs in the old days. Lanegan died in 2022, and the Songs for the Deaf band gathered at his funeral.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Josh Homme and Dave Grohl. Grohl met Homme after seeing Kyuss in Seattle in 1992, and Blues for the Red Sun became his soundtrack that summer. He drummed on Songs for the Deaf and half of Like Clockwork, and formed Them Crooked Vultures with Homme and John Paul Jones. Homme said they share a musical relationship he has with nobody else. In 2026 Grohl took the Queens on a stadium tour, calling it a lifelong bond.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Josh Homme and Chris Goss. Goss, leader of Masters of Reality, discovered Kyuss in Hollywood around 1990, moved to the desert for good and produced their key albums. He named the Queens by accident with a joke, co produced Rated R and Era Vulgaris with Homme as the Fififf Teeners, and became a fixture of the Desert Sessions. Goss once said the Queens is a business with Homme as the chief executive.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Josh Homme and Brody Dalle. They met at Lollapalooza in 1996 and got together in 2003 as her marriage to Rancid's Tim Armstrong collapsed. They married in December 2005 and had three children, Camille, Orrin and Wolf. Dalle sang on Lullabies to Paralyze and Like Clockwork. She filed for divorce in 2019 citing his drinking and drug use, and what followed was a bitter custody fight with accusations and restraining orders on both sides.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Josh Homme and Jesse Hughes. Hughes and Homme started Eagles of Death Metal as a joke band on the Desert Sessions in 1998, and Homme later talked Hughes into making music full time. Homme plays drums and produces, but rarely tours with them. They share tattoos of each other's nicknames, Baby Duck and Boots Electric. Homme called it musical schizophrenia, saying he is simply in two bands.[1] [2]

Josh Homme and Brant Bjork and John Garcia. Bjork and Garcia were Homme's bandmates in Kyuss, and Garcia rejoined him onstage in 2005. The friendship broke over the Kyuss Lives reunion. Homme sued them in 2012, and Bjork accused him of ego, control and greed. By 2020 Homme said the only proper way to end the Kyuss story would be to play again, but as of 2026 no reunion has happened.[1] [2] [3]

Alain Johannes and Natasha Shneider. The married musicians behind the band Eleven were key Queens collaborators. Shneider, who defected from the Soviet Union in 1976 and signed to Motown, played keyboards on the Lullabies tour. Johannes played guitar and bass on Lullabies and engineered Era Vulgaris. After Shneider died of cancer in 2008, Johannes made his first solo album as a tribute to her.[1] [2] [3]

Josh Homme and Troy Van Leeuwen. The two first crossed paths when Van Leeuwen toured with Failure while Homme was playing with Screaming Trees. Van Leeuwen joined in 2002 and, as of 2026, is the band's second longest serving member after Homme. He also played in Homme's Iggy Pop touring band and in the Post Pop Depression shows, which he called the most fun he ever had on the road.[1] [2]

Josh Homme and Iggy Pop. Homme said Iggy Pop's solo records inspired the Queens in the first place. In 2016 he co wrote and produced Pop's album Post Pop Depression, recorded partly at Rancho de la Luna, and led the touring band that ended at the Royal Albert Hall. Homme called Pop the greatest example of a frontman rock has, and said working with him recharged his faith in rock and roll.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Queens of the Stone Age

• Homme's first guitar teacher mostly taught polka, and he says he did not learn barre chords or use a pick until his third year. Homme wanted drums, but his parents said no, so he took up guitar at nine. His teacher focused on polka, and Homme credits that strange start, plus years of bending the blues scale, for the unusual scale his riffs are built on.[1] [2]
• Homme kept working on his grandfather's farm until the first Queens album came out, when he was twenty five. Even after Kyuss, Homme stayed on the family farm in the desert. He said he did not want to lose his grip on reality, and he had assumed he would grow up to be a contractor like his father.[1]
• Homme has owned only one car, a silver 1967 Camaro he bought at fourteen for twenty five hundred dollars. He bought it from the mechanic for the Palm Springs police department. He told NME that for a short time in the Nineties the Camaro was his only home.[1] [2]
• Judas Priest singer Rob Halford sings on Feel Good Hit of the Summer because he happened to be recording next door. The band asked him to join in, and he called the song a rock and roll cocktail. His voice appears only in the final chorus, but that was enough to earn him a credit.[1] [2]
• Rated R's closing track ends with minutes of repetitive horns meant to punish anyone who fell asleep to the album. I Think I Lost My Headache, Homme's favourite song on the record, also opens and closes in an unusual fifteen eight time signature before the horns take over.[1]
• Nick Oliveri's vocal on Quick and to the Pointless was only meant to be a guide track, including two verses sung in Dutch. The whole band recorded the song together in a single take, and they liked his scratch vocal so much that it stayed on the finished album.[1]
• Homme, Oliveri, Lanegan and soundman Hutch all have Freitag four fifteen tattooed on their ribs. It marks the time of their worst ever show, a Friday afternoon slot at Rock am Ring in Germany in 2001. They chose the ribs so it would hurt and they would never forget.[1] [2]
• Dave Grohl had to play every Songs for the Deaf track twice so the cymbals could be recorded separately. First he hit electronic pads in place of cymbals, then he played again with real cymbals over a silenced kit. The engineer Eric Valentine praised his patience with a very difficult process.[1]
• The face on the Songs for the Deaf disc belongs to Dave Catching, who plays on the album. The CD cover also came in three colours, red, magenta and orange, while the American vinyl had a completely different red Q design.[1]
• The main riff of No One Knows first appeared in a Desert Sessions track called Cold Sore Superstars. Homme said No One Knows and God Is in the Radio were both more than five years old by the time Songs for the Deaf was made.[1] [2]
• The famous cowbell sound in Little Sister is really a jam block played by Joey Castillo. That did not stop Will Ferrell from playing it on an actual cowbell on Saturday Night Live in 2005. Since Jon Theodore joined, the band has used a real cowbell live.[1] [2]
• Lullabies to Paralyze lists a song called The Fun Machine Took a Shit and Died, with a reward offered for its missing tapes. Homme later admitted the tapes were simply sitting at another studio, and said the band had falsely accused everyone in the world of theft. The song was re recorded for Era Vulgaris.[1]
• The band pulled the song Era Vulgaris off the album of the same name and mailed it to fans to leak themselves. A handwritten letter asked fans to plant the song anywhere on the internet it did not belong, from recipe sites to other bands' message boards.[1]
• In 2007 the Queens played a concert about two thousand three hundred feet underground in a German salt mine. The semi acoustic show at Sondershausen was filmed for a DVD that was never released. Fans assumed the band's split from Interscope was to blame.[1] [2]
• Alive in the Catacombs was the first time a band had been given official permission to play in the Paris Catacombs. Paris had turned them down several times. They filmed it on the eighth of July 2024, and Homme flew home for emergency surgery the next day.[1] [2]
• Elton John joined Like Clockwork because his assistant was Homme's old roommate. The assistant played the band to Elton on a long drive and passed on the number. When Elton called, Homme assumed a friend was pranking him.[1]
• A young British artist called Boneface, who designed the Like Clockwork artwork, once shaved Homme's head in a London barber shop. Homme found his work in Juxtapoz magazine. During a Guardian photo shoot, he marched the band across Soho and insisted Boneface, still wearing his helmet, do the haircut.[1]
• Bassist Michael Shuman played the Bar Mitzvah boy in the Adam Sandler film The Wedding Singer. Shuman, known as Mikey Shoes, joined the Queens in 2007. He also sings and plays in the band Mini Mansions and records solo as GLU.[1]
• Dean Fertita briefly appeared on the first season of MTV's The Real World. At the time he was in a band called Reigndance. He later led the power pop group the Waxwings, named after a line in Nabokov's novel Pale Fire.[1]
• Fertita got the Queens job through the band's longtime soundman Hutch, who met him on tour with the Raconteurs. Hutch was so central to the band that he was credited as a member on the debut album, with roles listed as front of house and guru.[1] [2]
• Troy Van Leeuwen had one week to learn thirty songs before his first Queens tour. He won the job over other guitarists, including Jeordie White, and ended up playing guitar, lap steel, keyboards and sometimes bass.[1]
• Jon Theodore says his Haitian father's heritage shapes his drumming. He has talked about loving the drumming of Haitian vodou ceremonies, where the patterns are tied to different spirits. He studied at the Oberlin Conservatory before playing in the Mars Volta.[1]
• Homme credited his bass playing on the first album to an alter ego called Carlo Von Sexron. Friends and bandmates have other names for him, including Baby Duck, J Ho and the Ginger Elvis. Oliveri calls him Mr. Lucky.[1] [2]
• Free tickets to the band's first Madison Square Garden headline show were hidden at three stations on the New York subway's Q line. They had played the Garden before, but only as an opening act for the Red Hot Chili Peppers in 2003 and Nine Inch Nails in 2005.[1]
• After Homme kicked a photographer in 2017, the BBC shelved his readings for the CBeebies Bedtime Stories children's show. One episode that had already aired was not repeated, and another recorded appearance was put aside indefinitely.[1]
• A Fatih Akin film called In the Fade takes its name from a Queens song, and Homme wrote its score. The German language drama came out in 2017. The original In the Fade, from Rated R, was sung by Mark Lanegan.[1] [2]
• Mark Lanegan left for a Queens tour the day after his 2002 wedding. He had married musician Wendy Rae Fowler, and the marriage did not last long after that. She later appeared in several Queens videos.[1] [2]
• Villains was the first Queens album with no guest musicians at all. Its opening song, Feet Don't Fail Me, is a playful retelling of Homme's own life, and he said he rewrote a cockier draft because it was not even true.[1] [2]
• Like Clockwork sold twelve thousand vinyl copies in its first week in America. That was about thirteen percent of its sales, and at the time the second biggest vinyl week since the chart began in 2010, behind only Daft Punk.[1]
• The Desert Sessions began in 1997 with Homme and friends playing for three days straight on psychedelic mushrooms. Songs there are written on the spot. Dean Ween and Alain Johannes wrote one on the ranch porch within four minutes of meeting each other.[1]
• Make It wit Chu started life on the Desert Sessions in 2003, with PJ Harvey singing backing vocals. Its music video was shot at Rancho de la Luna and directed by Rio Hackford, whom Homme later called his best friend.[1] [2]
• The record label for Kyuss had to get Homme's parents to sign his contract because he was under eighteen. The same era's promotional department gave away lava lamps to push the band's stoner image, which Chris Goss found far too campy.[1] [2]
• Homme says Easy Street was recorded like a demo, with no click track, uneven tempo and imperfect handclaps left in. He said a bad clap adds a human quality you cannot fake, and that the song, like a life, is in its mistakes.[1]
• Oliveri says members of the SWAT team at his 2011 standoff told him they played Feel Good Hit of the Summer before drug raids. He told Louder that a police robot with lights like RoboCop broke through his door, and that some officers turned out to be fans.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.