How cheating death in the Paris Catacombs revived Queens of the Stone Age

There's a sick irony that Josh Homme almost died for his art two years ago, 20 metres underground in the world-famous Catacombs of Paris.

Homme and his Queens Of the Stone Age (QOTSA) bandmates were there to fulfil a long-held dream of recording a live video performance among the remains of an estimated six million people.

However, doctors had advised Homme against it. The then 51-year-old US rocker had fled hospital with a 40-degree fever from an illness relating to his 2022 surgery for cancer and ploughed ahead with the performance.

"I just wanted it so bad, you know? ... I broke out of the emergency room," Homme later told Double J.

A day after the Catacombs recording, Homme jumped on an emergency flight to the US and underwent immediate surgery.

"Josh [Homme] almost died at the end of the Alive In The Catacombs filming for the movie," QOTSA drummer Jon Theodore tells Weekender this week.

"And we weren't even sure we were going to be a band anymore. We weren't even sure he was going to survive."

Homme made a full recovery, and Alive In The Catacombs was released in 2025 as an EP and video recording.

The experience of staring down the death of their leader and subsequently QOTSA has had a transformative impact on everyone involved.

When QOTSA came together to record their ninth album, Perfecth, joy was the overriding emotion.

"He [Homme] is as healthy as I've ever seen him in the 25 years I've known him," Theodore says.

"When we came back together to play, we were just so overjoyed to be together again and to have this chance to keep playing and keep working on stuff.

"It just happened really fast and really joyfully, and we didn't overthink it, we didn't overcook, and so it ended up being like a real kind of stream of consciousness thing that ended up really capturing the moment of elation."

Across almost 30 years, QOTSA have emerged as one of America's most thrilling rock bands, developing a sound defined as 'desert rock'.

The band's biggest single, No One Knows, topped the Triple J Hottest 100 in 2022 and the albums R Rated (2000), Songs For The Deaf (2002) and Era Vulgaris (2007) are modern classics.

More recent albums have expanded QOTSA's sound. The Mark Ronson-produced 2017 album Villains saw the band channel David Bowie-style glam rock, and In Times New Roman... (2023) was a bitter retort influenced by Homme's cancer diagnosis and the ugly fallout from his divorce from Brody Dalle of Australian band the Distillers.

Perfecth is perhaps the most eclectic album of QOTSA's career. It ranges from fuzzy and bombastic romps of Where The Goth Girls At? to New Orleans-style funk-rock on Sunday and folkie Easy Street.

Theodore says Homme's "brush with death" has fostered a feeling of creative freedom that the whole band have embraced.

"The biggest change in him is it's freed him up to kind of remove limitations we would place on ourselves," he says.

"Some of these ideas are pretty old that we turned into songs, and before we would get caught up in the thought process of maybe this doesn't really fit with our aesthetic or maybe this song doesn't fit on this particular collection of songs for this record.

"But now it's like this is beautiful in and of itself, and we should bring this thing to life.

"Early on it became clear that this album sort of runs a little bit like a mixtape, and there's a cohesion to it all together, but taken separately, the songs are pretty radically different from each other."

Easy Street, potentially the most radical departure, includes country artist Nikki Lane. Homme played on and produced Lane's 2022 album Denim & Diamonds.

"Nikki was a full-on kindred spirit right off the bat; she was one of us, and we were one of her," Theodore says.

"It was actually pretty simple. We were sitting there in the studio, and it was like, 'Man, this would be really great with a female vocal,' and then like the next thing was like, 'Oh, we should call Nikki,' and so we just called her right on the spot."

Queens of the Stone Age release Perfecth on October 30. The band play the Newcastle Entertainment Centre on December 16.

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