Queens of the Stone Age
Queens of the Stone Age have officially announced that their new album Villains will arrive August 25. The band also dropped the new single “The Way You Used to Do” today and revealed an extensive tour schedule for later this year.
In a release, frontman Josh Homme said, “The title Villains isn’t a political statement. It has nothing to do with Trump or any of that s**t. It’s 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.”
Produced by Mark Ronson and co-produced by Mark Rankin and mixed by Alan Moulder, Villains is the first QOTSA album since 2013’s …Like Clockwork.
Ronson stated, “Queens are and have always been my favorite rock n roll band ever since I walked into Tower on Sunset and bought Rated R in the summer of 2000, so it was incredibly surreal to be welcomed into their secret, pirate clan—or the ‘jacuzzi’ as Josh likes to call it. There were moments during the making of the album in which i was aware i was watching my musical heroes craft something that was sure to become one of my favorite moments on any Queens album. And to have some part in that felt like being in a dream–a very heavy, dark, wonderful dream.”
Homme added, “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.”
In addition to a number of festival dates already announced, Queens of the Stone Age will play headlining dates throughout North America in September and October before heading overseas to tour Europe throughout November.
