Queens of the Stone Age In Times New Roman… Review: A Familiar Musical Language

Queens of the Stone mastermind Josh Homme has taken the band’s dusty hard rock from generator-powered shows in Palm Desert all the way to mainstream festival stages. The group’s early revolving door of members solidified into a core quintet that pushed their fuzz rock into weird new places and, eventually, something akin to pop respectability on albums like 2017’s Villains. Regardless of how one feels about QOTSA’s musical development, though, no one could accuse them of repeating themselves. At least not until In Times New Roman….

While the desert rockers’ eighth album abandons the glossy dance-rock of its predecessor, it doesn’t do so in favor of exploring new styles, sounds, or textures. The subtle slapback guitar that opens the album’s first track, “Obscenery,” immediately recalls the retro-futurism of 2007’s Era Vulgaris. The sputtering garage-rock song hops along in a characteristic stop-start staccato, as spacey synths hover ominously. The post-chorus makes use of a tasteful string arrangement, hinting that the Queens haven’t completely shed their penchant for studio extravagance. Homme’s decadent falsetto, meanwhile, urges the object of his affection to “fuck [him] stupid.”

The band may have dipped into this well before, but no one pulls this particular sound off the way they do. The overwhelming sense of familiarity of songs like the infectious, no-frills “Paper Machete” is offset by QOTSA’s sheer competence as songwriters and musicians. The head-bopping verses flow seamlessly into a muscular chorus, and the track even erupts into a Lydian-mode guitar solo before closing out on a riff that echoes “If Only,” from the group’s 1998 debut.

It’s not long, though, before cracks start to appear. After rehashing the jammy rock ‘n’ roll of “I Sat by the Ocean,” from 2013’s …Like Clockwork, on “Negative Space,” the band fumbles the initial promise of “Time & Place” by running its swinging, crooked melody into the ground, offering up juvenile poetry in the process: “Oh, betrayal it tears me up inside/I’m just a fool, who is terrified.” Later, “Carnavoyeur” listlessly drags itself from one momentarily exciting lead guitar part to the next, while “Sicily” opens with a gummy Michael Shuman bassline that feels aimless, before squandering what could have been the album’s most rousing refrain.

Thankfully, lead single “Emotion Sickness” is all heartbreak, sleazy swag, and rolled R’s, with Homme once again likening his feelings to both an illness and cure: “Use once and destroy…A dose of emotion sickness I just can’t shake.” Elsewhere, the propulsive “What the Peephole Say” does its best to capitalize on another angular bassline, overlaying the track’s chaotic rumble with spry guitar licks and hummable vocal harmonies (“That a school or prison? Look same to me,” Homme sings in a surprising Foucauldian moment). The track’s bombastic chorus even flirts with surf rock as Dick Dale-style tremolo picking is peppered into the proceedings.

The best moments on In Times New Roman… prove that Queens of the Stone Age can still reliably deliver left-of-center alt-rock thrills, and Homme’s take-it-or-leave-it charisma is as tangible as it ever was. But after almost three decades of taking on every strand of rock music and embracing both the analog and the digital, it’s disheartening, if perhaps understandable, that the band seems unsure of where to go next.