Queens of the Stone Age, “In Times New Roman…”

The music Joshua Homme’s band Queens of the Stage makes has often built around a combination of a very specific sonic intensity and clever wordplay meant to jostle listeners out of their seats. While the lineup has changed and the band’s sound has shifted over the years, the disorientation has been a through-line. On their eighth album, In Times New Roman…, it’s dialed up several notches as Homme processes the last few years in a way that’s true to him.

Much of the album, the band’s first since 2017’s Villains, sounds like someone trying to work through an in-progress panic attack as the walls close in and the room turns on its side.

“Oh atrocious! ferocious!/ Check the price, alibi bye buy by the slice/ Absolutely!” Homme howls alongside heavy chugging and sinuous guitar string bends and slides on single “Emotion Sickness.”

Throughout, jagged guitar riffage cuts like a buzzsaw alongside wordplay-heavy lyricism that carries as much in what’s not said as what it is. You could probably teach a course on overt and hidden meanings. Maybe it’s not Shakespeare, but read the lyrics without the music and they sound like they’re pulled from a Hamlet or MacBeth soliloquy.

These songs are also angry and raw; the album more like 2000’s Rated R than 2013’s ...Like Clockwork. “Paper Machete,” album opener “Obscenery,” “What the Peephole Say” and album closer “Straight Jacket Fitting” drip with disgust and sarcasm, one of the latter name-dropping the album title. There’s little traditional structure but it’s the sort of off-balance vocal delivery fans have come to expect from Homme in Queens of the Stone Age.

His bandmates, Troy Van Leeuwen, Dean Fertita, Michael Shuman and Jon Theodore, lay down pithy, humid grooves over off-kilter rhythm sections from song to song (the band produced the album itself).

“Paper Machete” sounds like it’s coming from a scorned lover but could also work as a statement on fake news in American society in general: “The truth is just a peace of clay/ You sculpt, you change, you hide, then you erase.”

A menacing guitar tone, a bit like a ship’s horn, kicks off “Carnavoyeur,” before short organ blasts join in as Homme sings, “Every living thing will die/ From the king of the jungle to butterfly/ The only sin is waiting too long.” The ascending and descending guitar lines that arrive later in the song sound almost like a siren. The Midtempo tune is one of the mellower on In Times New Roman…, but it’s still menacing in its acceptance of the the inevitable: “When there’s nothing I can do, I smile.”

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.