‘Villains’ is simply 1) a word that looks fantastic and 2) a comment on the three versions of every scenario: yours, mine and what actually happened… Everyone needs someone or something to rail against—their villain—same as it ever was. You can’t control that. The only thing you can really control is when you let go.”—Joshua Homme

After hundreds of epic shows, memory lapses, unexplained injuries, one yearlong detour with Iggy Pop and multiple Grammy nominations, Queens Of The Stone Age reemerge from the desert newly scarred and somehow strangely prettier with lucky seventh album, ‘Villains’.

Produced by Mark Ronson and co-produced by Mark Rankin and mixed by Alan Moulder, ‘Villains’ is the first full album offering from Queens Of The Stone Age since 2013’s ‘…Like Clockwork’. Like the stunning artwork of returning illustrator Boneface, the sonic signatures of the lineup that took … Like Clockwork’ around the world and back— Founder/guitarist/vocalist/lyricist Joshua Homme, Troy Van Leeuwen (guitar, keys), Michael Shuman (bass), Dean Fertita (keys, guitar), Jon Theodore (drums)— are as unmistakable as ever, though coexisting with sufficient new twists to induce recurring double takes. As Homme himself puts it, “The most important aspect of making this record was redefining our sound, asking and answering the question ‘what do we sound like now?’ If you can’t make a great first record, you should just stop—but if you can make a great record but you keep making records and your sound doesn’t evolve, you become a parody of that original sound.”*