Queens of the Stone Age 'Queens of the Stone Age'

Upon the dissolution of the criminally overlooked Kyuss, guitarist Josh Homme pulled up stakes from the California desert for the Pacific Northwest to work on a new project concurrent with spending time on the road as second guitarist in Screaming Trees. Seeking a new sound, Homme discarded the sludgy low-end expanses of his former band for much tighter song structure (for the most part) and honest-to-goodness capital'h'hooks and what was originally christened Gamma Ray was quickly changed to Queens of the Stone Age shortly after birth. 

Homme returned to his old stomping grounds and reunited with latter-day Kyuss drummer Alfredo Hernandez to record as a fake trio (bass player 'Carlo von Sexron' is a nom-de-boom for Homme) and 'Queens of the Stone Age' came into full bloom. "Regular John" introduces Homme as a smooth and assured vocalist with great melodic instinct. Tracks like "Avon" and "Walkin On Sidewalks" lock into heavy riffs that are in entrancing in their repetition and subtle shifts. And it's hard to believe that insistently catchy "How To Handle a Rope" didn't make a greater impact on mainstream radio upon its initial release.

Amidst the mid-fi riffage and willful experimentalism of an artist forging a new sound for himself are some killer guitar melodies that could have easily come from 1971, 1991 or 2011. And that's part of the timelessness of this unassuming debut album. Queens of the Stone Age can only truly be classified as a 'rock band;' any attempt to narrow that down further would be to neglect the scope of Homme's broad body of work and the band's wide-reaching appeal.

The expanded 2011 edition of Queens of the Stone Age’s self-titled album is being made available once again on LP and CD. This "definitive version" of the album comes with original Loose-Groove cover artwork and several bonus tracks. 

Having released the original tracklist and artwork version of Queens of the Stone Age self-titled LP in 2022, in limited edition on orange and on black vinyl (aka ‘the 1998 version’), Matador now release the 2011 Version of the album on LP (specifically double-LP) and CD, this is the seen as the definite version of the album by the artist, and the version that we will keep in print going forward.