Queens of the Stone Age – Perfecth

Queens of the Stone Age's Perfecth arrives as the band's ninth album, released 30 years after their beginnings and shaped around a pointedly broken title: Josh Homme's idea that "perfect" is too neat a word for real life. The record's nine songs focus on different forms of love - family, friendship, desire, heartbreak, and the people who undo you or put you back together - giving the album a clearer emotional frame than the title first suggests.

That idea of damage and repair runs through the music as well. Several sources tie the album to kintsugi, the Japanese practice of mending broken pottery in a way that makes the cracks part of the finished object, and Perfecth plays with that tension between fracture and resolution. It was recorded between New Orleans, Los Angeles and related sessions sparked after the band's Catacombs project, with Queens deliberately throwing themselves into New Orleans just before Mardi Gras. Homme has said each song comes from its own world, and the tracklist backs that up: Insignificant Other is presented as the album's centerpiece, while Mono shifts from mono to stereo to mirror emotional claustrophobia opening into something much wider.

For longtime listeners, this is also a useful snapshot of where the current lineup has arrived. Homme, Troy Van Leeuwen, Michael Shuman, Dean Fertita and Jon Theodore are described as reaching a hard-won clarity here, keeping the band's mix of menace, surrealism and sleaze intact while pushing it toward something more tender and reflective. There is even a notable outside link in Sunday, a co-write with Iggy Pop first heard on Post Pop Depression, and Easy Street reportedly features Nikki Lane.