Queens of the Stone Age

Had it not been for Queens of the Stone Age, stoner rock may have stayed an underground phenomenon. However, the California band’s early-2000s hits, including the choppy hard rocker “No One Knows” and the raucous, cowbell-driven “Little Sister”, brought scuzzy riffs and sleazy grooves mainstream. Vocalist/guitarist Josh Homme formed Queens of the Stone Age after the breakup of his band Kyuss, an act that had embodied the heavy, hazy desert-rock scene of the ’90s. Homme’s new group continued the fuzzy vibes and landed a major-label record deal for their second album, 2000’s Rated R, which contained the debauched scorcher “Feel Good Hit of the Summer”. With the success of Songs for the Deaf in 2002 and Lullabies to Paralyze in 2005—the former with Dave Grohl on drums, the latter their first album to feature current guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen—Queens of the Stone Age grew into one of the biggest hard-rock bands going. Thanks to the addition of players such as keyboardist Dean Fertita, the band have maintained a lofty reputation while continuing to experiment, as on 2017’s grimy blues jaunt “The Way You Used to Do”, from the Grammy-nominated Villains LP. Homme has also continued to use his Desert Sessions album series, which he records with a revolving collective of friends and collaborators, to workshop ideas that then get sculpted into proper songs for their official albums; one such standout is the falsetto-fied funk seduction of “Make It Wit Chu”.