I honestly thought this album was about to be released this summer, but nothing came up. Last Monday, the band updated their Facebook page with simply ‘recording’, so we can now be sure that Queens of the Stone Age is now recording the follow-up of their 2007 album ‘Era Vulgaris’ despite the fact that the band has been talking about it for years, and had already mentioned they were recording in 2011. I remember reading in May 2011, a NME article reporting that Josh Homme had declared on BBC Radio 1 that the band was about to go back to the studio:
‘We're going to take our one last break that we would get for a month, come back and do Glastonbury, then immediately jump in the studio. Our record will be done by the end of the year. We have enough songs.’
But that was more than a year ago, what exactly took so long? I don’t exactly know, but Fender magazine (via Metal Injection) had this recent interview with guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen, and if he doesn’t bring any real answer to this question – Van Leeuwen just said, ‘Well, we wrote a bunch of stuff during the first sessions and then took a break, and now we’re back to the ghetto-blaster demo stage’ – the interview brings some light on this new record, as the guitarist explained:
‘It’s shaping up differently because we have some new band members that are really key. My role in the band in the past has been multi-instrumentalist: guitar, lap steel, keys. But we added a keyboard/guitar player [Dean Fertida] and so now we have three guitar players and can get any kind of keyboard playing. We are just kind of evolving.
Between me and Dean, our side of the stage is going to have a lot of gear. We both play guitar and both play keys. He’s way more of a pianist than I am, so that will be interesting too. We’re thinking somewhere between Lynyrd Skynyrd and James Brown. All the guitar parts on James Brown records are so rhythmically set in stone and juxtapose each other. It’s like taking what one guitar player would do and splitting it up. It’s multi-layered.
And our new bass player [Michael Shuman] is also really gifted and really talented. So just adding those characters to the mix changes things. It’s more fun to track live like that.’
I don’t know if you are like me but I have never heard any James Brown in QOTSA, so it may be a big change in their sound!