Queens of the Stone Age are officially entering album number nine.
The band will release Perfecth on October 30 via Matador Records, following 2023’s In Times New Roman…. Alongside the announcement, Queens of the Stone Age have released the new single “Insignificant Other,” a bruised meditation on distance, disappearance and the disorienting aftermath of losing someone who once occupied the center of your world.
The nine-track Perfecth was produced by Joshua Homme and bassist Michael Shuman and finds Homme, Shuman, Troy Van Leeuwen, Dean Fertita and Jon Theodore working across sessions recorded from New Orleans to Los Angeles. Rather than building the record around one narrowly defined sound, the band describes its songs as individual worlds connected by different permutations of love, lust, loss and the wisdom that can emerge after surviving all three.
“Every song sounds like it’s from a different world,” Homme says. “And that’s on purpose, because it’s trying to stitch together all these emotions revolving around love, lust, foolishness, and the sort of wisdom that comes as a gift from all that.”
That philosophy extends directly into the album’s deliberately misspelled title. Homme rejects the premise of perfection itself, breaking the word and reconstructing it as Perfecth. It is a small linguistic mutation that fits remarkably well within Queens of the Stone Age’s longstanding attraction to things that are beautiful precisely because something about them feels crooked.
“Nothing in this world is perfect, but everything seems to be ‘perfecth,’” Homme explains. “And that title is funny when you’re in a group, but it ain’t so funny when you’re alone.”
The concept behind Perfecth also draws from kintsugi, the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery in a way that emphasizes rather than conceals its fractures. Applied to Queens of the Stone Age, it is a particularly fitting metaphor. More than three decades into the band’s existence, Perfecth is being presented not as an attempt to erase what has been broken, but as a record interested in what happens when those fractures become part of the finished object.
That tension sits at the center of “Insignificant Other.” Recorded in only two takes, the song captures the five musicians playing with an intentionally loose, responsive quality rather than sanding every edge into studio perfection.
“It’s a song about distance,” Homme says. “About how someone can be your entire world only to simply vanish. And about the strange vertigo of being on the receiving end of that.”
“Insignificant Other” follows “Easy Street,” featuring Nikki Lane, which Queens of the Stone Age debuted live during the band’s Catacombs tour before releasing it as their first new music since In Times New Roman…. Together, the two songs begin to establish the emotional geography surrounding Perfecth, a record whose track titles alone range from “It’s Only Love” and “From The Cliff” to the considerably more QOTSA-coded “Where The Goth Girls At?” and “Run Away From The Mob.”
Because this is Queens of the Stone Age, even the album rollout refuses to behave like a conventional album rollout. The announcement arrives with a Chapman Baehler-directed video starring Big Chongus as the embodiment of “perfecth,” accompanied by Ruby Homme, Max Homme, Pumpkin Van Leeuwen, Isabella “Izzy” Puppolini Van Leeuwen and Reesa Shuman in a search for the perfect home. It follows the band’s Five Finger Filet teaser, which previously announced the date the album would not be released.
The band has even opened an official Queens of the Stone Age Complaint Hotline for anyone with grievances to air while waiting for October 30, with the possibility that callers might encounter an actual person on the other end.
Perfecth will be released digitally and on CD and standard black vinyl, with clear vinyl available through independent retailers. A limited deluxe gatefold edition will include handwritten lyrics, stationery, stamps housed inside a custom envelope and a bespoke piece of artwork.
Before the album arrives, Queens of the Stone Age return to the road September 15, beginning another stretch of North American dates that includes stadium appearances with Foo Fighters as well as Bourbon & Beyond and Aftershock. International dates will follow in Iceland, Japan, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand through December, with additional 2027 headline shows expected to be announced.
For a band that has spent its career finding beauty in distortion, danger, absurdity and imperfection, Perfecth may be one of the most characteristically Queens of the Stone Age album titles imaginable. Perfection was never really the point. The cracks are where things get interesting.
_Perfecth tracklist:
- “It’s Only Love”
- “Insignificant Other”
- “Where The Goth Girls At?”
- “Mono”
- “From The Cliff”
- “Sunday”
- “Easy Street”
- “Phantom Limb”
- “Run Away From The Mob”
Featured image credit: Andreas Neumann
