Palm Desert, CA · desert rock · alt-rock

Queens of the Stone Age

2 upcoming festivals

Josh Homme's robot-boogie riffs — heavy music with a lounge singer's sense of swing and menace, desert-rock royalty at full strut.

Queens of the Stone Age were formed in 1996 by guitarist and singer Josh Homme, previously of Kyuss, whose work had helped define the desert rock sound around Palm Desert, California. The band has run through a long list of contributors over the years, with Homme the constant, and its lineup has at various points included players drawn from across the American rock underground.

The music is built on repetitive, tightly wound riffs, dry production and a rhythmic push that owes as much to boogie and glam as to metal. Homme's falsetto and deadpan delivery sit against that machinery, and the songs often trade in sardonic menace. The band became one of the most commercially successful acts to come out of the stoner rock scene.

desert rockalt-rock