Revisit other SputStaff Top 10 Lists:

Bjork | Bon Iver | Kanye West | Metallica | Mastodon | mewithoutYou |

 My Chemical Romance | The National | Say Anything | Taylor Swift | Tim Hecker | Thrice

Foreword:

The year is 2023 and rock ‘n’ roll is officially dead in the ground, as recently cemented by Queens of the Stone Age’s latest record In Times New Roman. Sad? Well lemme tell you, this time ten years ago many thought the same – they thought rock’s parent bands had split up prematurely, failed to split up at a dignified age, failed to move with the times, or flat-out lost its grit. Radiohead had once promised us the future: the future was Muse, Coldplay and The Killers. The future haemorrhaged its savings accounts on Chinese Democracy and The Endless River and left a creative dearth so dearth-like that we are today surviving our way through the legacies-to-be of Black Midi and The 1975 because the hacks finally have someone to talk about again.

Dad said everything would be okay as long as rock ‘n’ roll could save us. Fuck you, dad.

Back in the ’10s people thought rock had failed to find new parents. They were (dubiously, but prevailingly) wrong! Radio rock didn’t need a stepdad – it needed a dad who stepped up! The dad was Josh Homme, second only to Dave Grohl on extending gruff-pop-music-played-on-guitars’ lease on popular life, allowing us to remember and savour that ten years before that, the man was churning out classic bangers to which good, dumb, good times were (probably) had in fraternal multitudes. Bangers? Cool – let’s go meet a few of them….

Honorable Mentions:

15. Medication

14. Song for the Dead

13. Suture Up Your Future

12. Little Sister

11. Keep Your Eyes Peeled

Sputnik Staff’s Top 10 Queens of the Stone Age songs:

(10) “Better Living Through Chemistry”

from Rated R (2000)

I spent a significant amount of my teenage years trying to puzzle out the question of what, exactly, Queens of the Stone Age were supposed to be. Straight-ahead rockers keeping guitar music alive with their desert heat-baked riffs? Psychedelic mouldbreakers, shapeshifting with every new album? A bunch of guys banging out some rock ‘n’ roll in their basements or an everchanging collective of visionaries, where names like Mark Lanegan and Dave Grohl could pass on through without overshadowing the band as a whole? These days I think the answer was likely none of these, with a small pinch of all of them, but for a glorious moment on their best album it was all true and more. “Better Living Through Chemistry” is an amorphous mobius strip of a song, a slippery kaleidoscope which seems to wind back on itself infinitely just when you think you’ve seen the end. A surreal dream sequence intermission – introduced bizarrely by some lyrics from Bjork’s debut – is bookended by a foot-tapping start and end, where Josh Homme’s guitar stutters out mercury and quicksilver licks in jittery bursts. It’s a monster of a tune, both right there with you and worlds away, the song that best exemplifies the confusing contradictions and paradoxes at the heart of this band. – Rowan5215

(9) “My God is the Sun”

from …Like Clockwork (2013)

Close your eyes and think of Josh Homme. Think long, think hard, picture the growth sprouting from his scalp like an augur of grilled steak, his face that is large and shapely like a large statue of a shapely face, his lean, inculpable eyes that hold the reins to both wry banter and pernicious suffering. What is he wearing? Is it a leather jacket, or is it a dadly buttoned shirt with a collar and stupid fucking palm trees all over it? Is it both? Sure. That is he. As some of my good colleagues point out in their own pieces, the QOTSA gateau is baked from catchy testosterone, simple riffs, and complex ego; as many others touch on, the icing on top is the readiness with which they flex that shit damn, there might be more going on here.

As we all already knew, …Like Clockwork was the record that really went off the deep end with Homme and company’s penchant for not-like-the-other-Queens-isms, replete with mood swings real and wardrobe changes figurative. Some of these were less successful than others – we don’t talk about fuddy-duddy bowler hat Homme (“Fairweather Friends”), prog-in-a-wifebeater Homme (“If I Had a Tail”), or emo-fringe Reznor-fellating Homme (“Kalopsia”) – but perhaps the most stylish glow-up of the lot was the vintage makeover afforded to the classic QOTSA sound on “My God is the Sun.”

More than anything else on the album, even including the pop-rock of “I Sat by the Ocean”, this is the track that sticks truest to the band’s desert rock roots: listen closely to that verse and tell me you don’t hear the same stuff as, say, “First It Giveth” beneath it; try to hang off the stop-start of the opening riff without picking up on the scuzzy cabin fever that sustained the more electric cuts on Lullabies to Paralyze. These are good things, and Dave Grohl reprising his role as session drummer makes them better still – but the greatness here comes in an unexpected dash of sepia twee, its primary draw an all too rare brand of high-octane retro-leaning camp.

When Homme’s guitar solo kicks in – and it does rather kick – one should spend less time savouring the man’s technique and much more envisioning him loop-the-looping away in a bi-plane, aviator goggles down and leather gloves perhaps a tad furrier than they need to be, the trail of smoke from his engine almost matched by that of the cigar clamped firmly between his rictus-bearing pork-chops, suggesting an irreverence to danger equal parts cartoonish and steely – and tell me the contrast between his quavering verse melodies and diaphragm-heavy chorus aren’t the very image of a man pivoting erratically in and out of bravado. Much like the ascending lead that underpins said chorus’ burgeoning suspense, shit goes up. The distinction between QOTSA’s enduring zingers and tepid cuts is becoming increasingly obvious as age sets its claws into their back-catalogue and present-day output alike, but trust me when I say it that doesn’t get much more evocative than this. – johnnyoftheWell

(8) “Smooth Sailing”

from …Like Clockwork (2013)

Oops! I have never actually thought for very long about why exactly “Smooth Sailing” is one of my favorite Queens of the Stone Age songs. And you know what? I shouldn’t have to! Since the hell when was this band about thinking??? No, what first set QOTSA apart from their generation of rock stylists was always how seriously they took their base appetites; their contemporaries prodded puckishly at the genre’s status quo, seeking approval from its jaded mavens, while Josh Homme, well… you know. A Julian Casablancas or a Jack White would be far too precious and winking in approaching a white-boy funk as sleazy as “Smooth Sailing”. In Homme’s hands, though, each briuse and hickey gets relished unctuously, and his rocka-Bowie vocal swagger weighs in at possibly its most playful and flexible to date, working with the song’s strutting meter rather than under it and putting his oily, lascivious falsetto right front-and-center where it belongs. Pay close attention and you might even notice his trademark desert-breeze guitar heroics twisting away in a support role (and leering towards the forefront on that perennially-underestimated bridge), but pay as little attention as possible and it’s just your own theme music, plays wherever you are. Fuck yeah. – Kompys2000

(7) “You Think I Ain’t Worth a Dollar, but I Feel Like a Millionaire”

from Songs for the Deaf (2002)

Ever since its release, I’ve always found Songs for the Deaf’s commercial success to be a bit of an anomaly. It’s triumph, by a significant margin I might add, was obviously predicated on its incredible singles, but as an album it surprises me Songs for the Deaf grabbed the zeitgeist as hard as it did, because its intentions feel very anti-mainstream. While “No One Knows” and “Go with the Flow” are straight-shooting rock songs, the album itself is an experimental concept album, taking the listener through the Californian desert listening to various radio stations along the way. The result is an eclectic blend of rock music hues, with plenty of “out there” moments to test any mainstream goers’ patience. The thing is, the album wastes no time in letting you know that – as it brazenly opens up with “You Think I Ain’t Worth a Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire”, led by the late Mark Lanegan.

As far as album-openers go for QOTSA, this is possibly the greatest in their discography; laying out the concept and setting the tone. The track immediately starts out with the warning sound of a car door being left open, the car’s ignition engages and the radio begins to jump from station to station as the door slams shut. The radio station of choice: “Clone Radio” (a jibe at the industry’s penchant for overplaying vapid, dime-a-dozen artists on every station). The presenter welcomes in Songs for the Deaf which quickly segues into a building drum beat and riff that explodes with Lanegan’s ferocious roar. As far as iconic moments go in the QOTSA canon, this introduction is up there with the best of them. As for the track itself, it’s a raw, driving rock tune with “Tension Head” qualities on steroids. A plethora of fuzzed-up licks over the propelling rhythm, Homme’s furtive, haunting backing-vocals in the outer rim of the track, and the classic feint where you think the song ends, only for it to kick you in the teeth a few seconds later. In short, “You Think I Ain’t Worth a Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire” is an anti-radio proclamation and a mind-blowing way to open up an album. – Simon K.

(6) “I Sat By the Ocean”

from …Like Clockwork (2013)

For a band whose primary selling point is bringing riffy stoner rock out of the desert and closer to the mainstream through their comparatively straightforward and accessible bent, I’ve always personally found Queens of the Stone Age a challenging act to get into. Most of their songs have proven impenetrable to my ears to begin with, even if over time they’ve divulged significant sonic riches. “I Sat By The Ocean” earns near-unique marks from me within the QOTSA discography as a song which, upon first listen, was an obvious banger. And, the thing is, over the following decade or so, nothing’s really changed. When “I Sat By The Ocean” comes on, it’s jammin’ time – no matter what I’m doing or who I’m with, there’s nodding of the head, tapping of the toes, and involuntary humming or singing-along involved. What exactly makes the tune both instantly enjoyable and utterly timeless is rather hard to pin down, but its sense of groove from the first note, jaunty guitar melodies, a memorable titular first lyrical line, and an irrepressible chorus (“silence is closer, we’re passing ships in the night”) certainly don’t hurt the cause, especially given all those factors come together into a concise and flawlessly-executed piece of music. If QOTSA’s best days are now behind them (which I’m sadly rather confident is the case at this point), “I Sat By The Ocean” is the kind of all-time rock jam which leaves the band’s legacy well-positioned, entirely on its own. Tunes like this don’t come around every day. “I Sat By The Ocean” is a song for the dead, for the living, and for everyone in between. Yeah, that last sentence sounded cooler in my head. – Sunnyvale

(5) “Song for the Dead”

from Songs for the Deaf (2002)

What makes a song truly iconic? In my opinion, more than anything, the most deciding factor is the impact it makes on both my short and long-term memory; the most iconic songs have me impulsively looping them on repeat, while simultaneously burrowing deep into my brain stem and staying with me for weeks, months, even years after the fact. Dave Grohl’s paradigm-shifting drum intro is the type of pulse-pounding musical statement that will stay with me for my entire life, maybe even beyond the grave as I ascend and become one with the Platonic ideal of drumming, my synapses decomposing into a grayish goo beneath me. Grohl’s astonishing rhythmic showmanship leaves me transfixed for multiple reasons; His exemplary playing is reason enough for me to wax poetic, but its simultaneous role as a towering buildup to one of QOTSA’s shining moments as a band cements it as a masterpiece of songwriting and musicality. Mark Lanegan’s droning, raspy vocals fit the backing instrumental so perfectly that the song’s lyrical content borders on irrelevant, with the end of each verse collapsing into echoing gang chants whose origin can only be pinpointed as somewhere beyond the dunes. Josh Homme’s guitar work on the song is some of the most outright fun music he’s ever laid to tape, squealing during the verse cutouts with the same tongue-in-cheek joy that punctuates all of the group’s strongest compositions. Every awe-inspiring detail of “Song For The Dead” collides with a vengeance at the crossroads of the song’s outro, where Grohl somehow turns the dial up even higher on his percussive wizardry, Homme’s distorted octaves form a dusty wall of sound, and the rising gain and dynamics threaten to drown the listener in a sandy avalanche. More than any superfluous radio knob-turning interlude, “Song For The Dead” captures the feeling of a surreal drive through an endless desert, dirt and salt splitting underneath your wheels, the sun searing your skin through the windshield. – YoYoMancuso

(4) “In the Fade”

from Rated R (2000)

Despite primarily being Josh Homme’s band, Queens of the Stone Age’s best moments sometimes came when he accepted to stay in the background to let other great musicians shine in the spotlight.

“In the Fade” is a prime example, offering Mark Lanegan (RIP) the center stage he never quite got with Screaming Trees. His gritty vocals testify of a pain that has been magnified through self-reflection, coming in the form of cryptic lyrics that constitute as much a yearning for salvation as an apology for self-destruction. “You live ’till you die”, indeed, but whether that’s an existentialist-empowering thought or a doomer quote depends on how well you feel when you listen to the song. Despite these rather dark undertones, “In the Fade” is a ~smooth ride~, primarily thanks to the bouncy and relatively speedy Oliveri bassline that intelligently contrasts the slow keys and vocals. With the dry-hitting drums, this bassline – arguably Oliveri’s best – brings grooviness to a song that would otherwise be the definition of deadpan. With all that, there’s only space left for a guitar, and we sometimes forget that Homme is, first and foremost, a guitar player before being a singer. His dreamy licks in the verse and post-chorus, as well as his more stoner-oriented riff in the chorus are ultimately simple, showing once again that he knows when to put himself at the band’s service and let others get all the praise.

Because, yes, Queens of the Stone Age was also Lanegan and Oliveri’s band. – Erwann S.

(3) “No One Knows”

from Songs for the Deaf (2002)

Whether your rock and/or roll is desert-based, spliff-laced, fast-paced, or whatever the fuck Villains was, the whole goshfucked raison d’être of the genre is attitude, man, and the skeletal songwriting of “No One Knows” is stuffed with enough attitude to transmit searing images of Josh Homme’s boots into the brainbanks of any aspiring gig photographers as soon as they hear those first four blasts of C Minor kick the whole shebang off.

What follows is a masterclass in performance. The lads play this track right down the fucking middle, pummeling downbeats and cycling through roughly three chords outside of the bridge, playing their parts so convincingly, so deftly, so tightly that a kind of mirage shimmers over the noise and makes you want to warn any band that doesn’t have Dave Grohl for a drummer that covering this song is a hapless endeavour, and not just because Homme has an exceptional legal team backing his every whim.

Off the record, a quick glance at streaming numbers (and a long, long daydream down memory lane to the days of Real Radio Rock) will reveal that this list is mistaken, and that “No One Knows” is the best Queens of the Stone Age song by a factor of at least three. At the very least, I think it makes a fitting choice: everybody seems to be divided on what this band can and should represent, and when they best represented it — “No One Knows” does almost nothing to clarify this conundrum, and therefore comes out trumps. Much like David Bowie’s codpiece in Labyrinth, we don’t know why it’s here, puzzling it out only confuses things further, and audiences remain ferociously thirsty for it decades down the dusty trail. – MiloRuggles

(2) “…Like Clockwork”

from …Like Clockwork (2013)

As a reader, I’m sure you’ve come to the conclusion the Staff at Sputnikmusic have a lot of reverence for …Like Clockwork, since it has taken up so much of this Top 10 list, but there’s good reason for it. …Like Clockwork was created with Homme’s songwriting at its absolute pinnacle. A complete overhaul in sound and a reinvention that changed everything we’d come to know and love about the band, all done whilst preserving Queens’ fundamental DNA. On its own, if you hadn’t heard anything from this album prior, “…Like Clockwork” would have been a shock to the system because of how stark in contrast it is to anything else from the band. A melancholic ballad that is both intro and extrospective, encapsulating Josh Homme’s heavy musings from this era of the band. Homme opens up the track with a short, repetitious loop on the piano while he lays his pained vocal performance bare.

Out of all the tracks on this album, this has the most palpable imagery. I imagine Homme sitting on a street bench at dusk, observing hundreds of people obliviously passing him by, while he ponders over a million things racing through his mind. The subject matter feels beset with doubt and regret – has he done enough with his life? What’s the purpose of it all? It has a level of vulnerability we’ve never seen from the frontman before, and these deep cuts display a rockstar showing very raw, human emotion. The instrumental work also galvanises this track’s – and the album’s – legendary status with its weeping guitar passages, lush orchestral backdrop, and hypnotic rhythm section that thuds malignly underneath the gorgeous string arrangements and gossamer guitar tones, pounding like a heartbeat; a certain reminder that for all the beauty in life, there is always something sinister lurking in the shadows. – Simon K.

(1) “I Appear Missing”

from …Like Clockwork (2013)

I don’t listen to Queens of the Stone Age as much or as fervently as I used to. Some combination of their anodyne last two records and isn’t-this-old-yet? dirtbag rocker schtick wore very thin a band I thought of as one of their generation’s best a decade ago. But I got my picture perfect movie ending to that springtime of love without even knowing it, when I saw them play with Nine Inch Nails on the …Like Clockwork tour.

I consider it something of a last hurrah, Homme and co. tearing through almost every song on our list here (“…Millionaire” and “Song For the Dead” didn’t quite hit right without Oliveri and Lanegan present), absolutely demolishing the set Trent Reznor and his band played right after. The whole thing ripped, but something special happened when the band launched into the newly released “I Appear Missing”.

An absolutely riveting guitar solo extended the song to nearly ten minutes – a reminder that, for all his faults, Josh Homme truly is a magnificent talent on his instrument of choice – but the best happened immediately after. This Sydney crowd, as diverse as any you could imagine – metal and indieheads, big tattooed bikers and punk girls, day-ones from the Kyuss era and scrawny little 16-year-olds like myself, trying to look tougher than we were – all just dropped the bullshit and sang. Homme rang out the song’s coda, and a stadium choir of untrained falsetto rang it back to him, without pretense or prejudice, transforming the song from something inarguably great to genuinely rapturous. Never loved anything till I loved you, indeed. – Rowan5215

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