Queens of the Stone Age is the debut studio album by American rock band Queens of the Stone Age, released on September 22, 1998, through Loosegroove Records in the United States, Roadrunner Records internationally, and Man's Ruin Records on vinyl. It was primarily written and recorded in April 1998 by founding member Josh Homme and his former Kyuss bandmate Alfredo Hernández, with Hernández playing drums and Homme singing and playing the rest of the instruments. Homme also produced the album alongside Joe Barresi. Bassist Nick Oliveri, also a former member of Kyuss, would join the band by the time of the album's release. Queens of the Stone Age received generally positive reviews from critics, who placed it in the stoner rock genre and drew comparisons to krautrock bands such as Neu! and Can, as well as to Kyuss and other metal bands.
In 2011, Homme reissued Queens of the Stone Age through his Rekords Rekords label, having it remastered and adding three additional tracks–two from the album's recording sessions and one from two years earlier. The reissue received a positive critical response and was accompanied by a supporting concert tour. Working on the reissue and subsequent tour also inspired part of the band's approach to recording its sixth album, ...Like Clockwork, released in 2013. In 2022, the album was reissued again on Matador Records with its original LP artwork.
Background and recording Following the breakup of Kyuss in 1995, guitarist Josh Homme recorded new material in Seattle with producer Chris Goss, bassist Van Conner, and drummer Victor Indrizzo under the name Gamma Ray. The results, including the song "If Only Everything", were released as the Gamma Ray EP in 1996. Homme subsequently toured as a guitarist with Screaming Trees and started The Desert Sessions, a series of jam sessions involving many musicians including former Kyuss drummer Alfredo Hernández. The song "Avon" originated from the Desert Sessions, appearing on Volume 3 in 1998. After receiving a cease and desist order because the name Gamma Ray was already in use by a German band, Homme changed the name to Queens of the Stone Age. The Gamma Ray material was re-released in 1997 on the Kyuss / Queens of the Stone Age split EP, along with the additional track "Spiders and Vinegaroons" from the Gamma Ray sessions; the release featured some of the final studio recordings by Kyuss while debuting the "Queens of the Stone Age" moniker for Homme's new project.
Reflecting on this period in 2011, Homme remarked:
The first ten tracks on Queens of the Stone Age were recorded in April 1998 at Monkey Studios in Homme's hometown of Palm Desert, California. Hernández played drums on the tracks and Goss performed on "You Would Know" and "Give the Mule What He Wants", playing bass guitar and singing backing vocals. Homme sang lead vocals and played the rest of the instruments on the recordings, crediting himself under the pseudonym "Carlo" for his bass guitar, keyboard, and piano work. He also served as a producer on the album, alongside Joe Barresi. The Gamma Ray song "If Only Everything" was re-recorded during these sessions and its title shortened to "If Only", and the Desert Sessions song "Avon" was also re-recorded. "I Was a Teenage Hand Model" was recorded separately at Rancho De La Luna in Joshua Tree, California, with the studio's personnel contributing as performers: studio owner Fred Drake sang and played drums, co-owner Dave Catching played percussion, and sound engineer Patrick "Hutch" Hutchinson played piano. Former Dinosaur Jr. bassist Mike Johnson is credited with "sofa" on the track. Hutch, who served as live sound engineer for both Kyuss and Queens of the Stone Age, is credited as a member of the group on the album, with the roles "FOH" (front of house), "guru", "HardWalls", and "back of door".
The album's recordings were mixed by Barresi and mastered by Dan Hersch at DigiPrep in Hollywood. The image for the album cover was taken from the 1972 book The Pin-Up: A Modest History by Mark Gabor, featuring Trinidadian-British model Sylvia Bayo. Photographs for the liner notes were taken by Tony Tornay, while the back cover photograph was taken by rock photographer Lisa Johnson; it shows Hernández, Homme, and former Kyuss bassist Nick Oliveri, the latter of whom joined Queens of the Stone Age just prior to the album's release and would remain with the band until 2004. Oliveri also appears in the album's closing moments, in a recorded answering machine message to Homme in which he agrees to join the band. Homme created the layout for the album's packaging with graphic artist Frank Kozik.
Critical reception
Queens of the Stone Age received generally positive reviews from critics. Writing for NME, reviewer Kitty Empire scored it 8 out of 10, comparing it to Kyuss and saying that "for all its indisputable primitive charms, Queens of the Stone Age is actually a step forward in stoner evolution. The guitars are still flint-hard, the tunes still load-bearing. But the sound roaring out of the speakers is far sleeker and more hypnotic than the dumb chug that stoner rock has periodically devolved into in Homme's absence. The excellent 'Regular John' sounds almost motorik, as though Neu! had level billing with [Black] Sabbath one strange night. There are keyboards and maracas on the very un-stone age 'I Was a Teenage Hand Model'. And Homme—who didn't sing in Kyuss—frequently swaps his bone-dry metallic tones for something a little more soulful on songs like 'You Can't Quit Me Baby'." Tom Sinclair of Entertainment Weekly gave it a B− rating, remarking that the band "delivers a workmanlike collection of heavy music that's just a bit too cerebral to fall under the stoner rock rubric (Fu Manchu). Queens of the Stone Age is intermittently potent, but when you hear the ripped-off 'If Only' (a.k.a. the Stooges' 'I Wanna Be Your Dog'), you can't help but think QOTSA might be a great band—if only they could write a song that good on their own."
James Hunter of Rolling Stone gave the album four stars out of five and commented that the band had "found a vital place between art-metal seriousness and pop pleasure. It begins right away with the trancelike 'Regular John', a track that layers Homme's yelping guitar accents over a fuzzy groove. While other metalheads play around with sequencers, Queens of the Stone Age have something a little more heated and classical in mind. The rest of the album charges on with its compelling contrasts between Homme's papery vocals and the surrounding rampage. Sometimes the songs explore pure heaviness, as on the wall-rattling 'Walkin' on the Sidewalks'. But more often they thrillingly toy with elements like vocal hooks ('You Would Know') and metal frenzy ('How to Handle a Rope') without giving in to either." Writing in Spin, Joe Gross scored Queens of the Stone Age 7 out of 10, saying "While there's really nothing in this collection worth trading in those Melvins albums for, it's strangely compelling to hear how Homme and his cohorts killed many an afternoon in a thick THC haze with Can's Tago Mago, then worked it into their patented pedal abuse."
Reviewing the album after Queens of the Stone Age had gained mainstream success with 2000's Rated R and 2002's Songs for the Deaf, Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic remarked: "Hearing Queens of the Stone Age's long out of print debut many years after its initial 1998 release does pack the shock of revelation: Josh Homme's tightly wound blueprint for QOTSA was in place from the very beginning. [...] There is sex and swagger to Queens of the Stone Age, there's a swing to the rhythms, there's a darkly enveloping carnal menace buttressed by muscle and lust that keeps the album from being an insular stoner headpiece. Certainly, there's enough sinewy force to suggest the mighty brawn of Rated R and Songs for the Deaf; Homme retained enough of the desert spaciness of Kyuss to give Queens of the Stone Age an otherworldly shimmer, a hazy quality he later abandoned for aggressive precision, so this winds up as a unique record in his catalog, a place where you can hear Homme's past and future intertwining." Critic Robert Christgau viewed the album negatively, however, rating it a "dud" in his Consumer's Guide column for The Village Voice.
Queens of the Stone Age was eventually certified silver in the United Kingdom in February 2006, for sales exceeding 60,000 copies. It was listed in the 2010 reference book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, the only Queens of the Stone Age album to be included.
Reissue Following a "deluxe edition" reissue of Rated R in 2010, Homme announced that the band would reissue Queens of the Stone Age as well, stating that the album had become "impossible to get, it'd been outta print for so long. I'm not very nostalgic by nature, so it wasn't like 'guys, remember the days', it was more like in the internet age this record should be able to get got, you know? I really like this band Cheap Trick, and they were doing shows where they were playing their first three records three nights in a row, and so we started talking about 'wow, OK, we'll never get a chance to re-release this thing, and what if we just focused on the first record? I dunno if that means we're going to play it exactly start to finish. We haven't really decided. It's kind of a cool idea. [...] I'm just glad that it's not like some bad haircut when I listen to it. I've listened to it, and I love that record, and it's been really fun to try to put myself back in that headspace where I was just obsessed with trying to trance out on guitar."
The album was remastered by Brian Gardner for the reissue. The title of the song "How to Handle a Rope" was extended to "How to Handle a Rope (A Lesson in the Lariat)", and three additional tracks were added in between the album's existing tracks: "The Bronze" and "These Aren't the Droids You're Looking For", which were from the album's recording sessions and had originally been released in 1998 on The Split CD (a split release with Dutch band Beaver), and "Spiders and Vinegaroons" from the Gamma Ray sessions, which had been released on the Kyuss / Queens of the Stone Age split EP in 1997. The reissue was released through Homme's label, Rekords Rekords, with distribution through Domino Recording Company. The band, which by then consisted of Homme, guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen, bassist Michael Shuman, drummer Joey Castillo, and keyboardist Dean Fertita, scheduled a tour in support of the album's reissue.