Get unlimited access to everything VICE has to offer.

Turn off all ads on VICE.com

Exclusive New VICE Documentaries

Member Exclusive Features & Columns

Turn off all ads on VICE.com

Exclusive New VICE Documentaries

Member Exclusive Features & Columns

Turn off all ads on VICE.com

Exclusive New VICE Documentaries

Member Exclusive Features & Columns

4 Magazines Delivered to Your Door

VICE Album Reviews, October 30: Queens of the Stone Age, Nickelback, DIIV, and More

Playing footsie with this week’s hottest new music, including the latest releases from WHY? and Silverwing Killer.

By Adam Christopher Smith

Share on X (Opens in new window)X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Facebook

Share using Native toolsShareCopied to clipboard

Music journalism is going to the wall, and places for sensible, well-informed, nuanced takes on the latest releases are dwindling. So we thought we might as well put the final nail in the coffin.

Read this month’s album reviews here, here, here, and here.

Queens of the Stone AgePerfecthMatador RecordsI never asked to see Josh Homme’s toes, but then the Queens of the Stone Age frontman sauntered down my timeline in a pinstripe suit and a pair of flip-flops and here we are.

The “Ginger Elvis” turned heads with his runway debut at Ann Demeulemeester’s Paris Fashion Week show recently, with Stereogram calling him a “silver fox”—again, not something I expected to see. On the band’s Instagram, Alexa Chung posted a heart-eyes emoji, while other fans said things like “as a 40-year-old man, I never thought I could get pregnant, let alone from a picture, but here we are,” and, simply, “I guess I’m gay now.”

The 53-year-old singer-songwriter came up in the desert rock scene, so I guess he’s used to thirst. And of course, he’d already been the subject of a viral post asking, “OK, but how did we go from this to this,” with a photo from the early 2000s next to one of his current face card. It’s funny how this sort of post cycle always seems to take place just before a band’s new record drops, but I guess it’s good to have something to talk about, because QOTSA’s ninth album is, as their material goes, a little unremarkable.

Look, you do not, under any circumstances, “need” to “study” Homme’s glow-up. Honestly, I’m not sure there’s been quite so much speculation over his appearance since the news that he’d stolen The Distillers’ Brody Dalle away from Rancid’s Tim Armstrong hit my schoolyard friendship group like a Love Island bombshell. To a 15-year-old boy, it was........

© Vice