Queens of the Stone Age, Alive in the Catacombs

Josh Homme and QOTSA shed their gnarled, noisy skin by unplugging deep within the Catacombs of Paris

Queens of the Stone Age—Alive in the Catacombs [2025]

Josh Homme lifts himself off a tomb at the start of Queens of the Stone Age's short film Alive in the Catacombs, ascending from his recline as if he was a vampire rising from the grave. Homme seems weary and grizzled, his smirk and swagger a distant memory.

Alive in the Catacombs is the realization of a dream Homme harbored when he was a teenager: he wanted to play music within the Catacombs of Paris, an underground cemetery piled high with skulls and skeletons. It took years of persuasion to convince the city of Paris to grant Queens of the Stone Age permission to perform within the Catacombs, a delay that may have been to the band's advantage. Twenty years ago, when the group still was shaking off the midnight debauchery of Rated R, they may have been to callow and aggressive to adapt to their surroundings or to the demands imposed by living life.

Not long after Queens played deep in the Catacombs, the band canceled their 2024 European tour due to Homme's health. This came on the heels of the revelation in 2023 that he'd been treated for an unspecified cancer, another personal ailment in a decade that included self-inflicted scandals and a contentious public divorce. Some of these troubles provided a disquieting undercurrent on the last three QOTSA albums, particularly In Times New Roman. All this turbulence comes to the surface on Alive in the Catacombs partially due to the physical demands of its recording. The confined space of the Catacombs lacks electricity, so the location robbed Queens of the Stone Age of their trademark amplification and drums, forcing them to play on acoustic guitars, augmented by strings and anything that could be run through a generator. Not so much stripped down as reimagined, the music feels vulnerable, an emotion Homme largely has buried in work from Kyuss through Queens of the Stone Age.

If there's a trace of irony in the fact that that Queens of the Stone Age is excavating emotions as they're burrowed deep underground, neither the film nor its accompanying album dwells upon this possibility. All the shadows and flames flickering upon the entombed bones provide enough heightened reality; the music is grounded, placing an emphasis on melody and lyric that's unusual for QOTSA. Avoiding singles and staples, the setlist plucks a song a from each of their last five albums—the opener seamlessly stitches "Running Joke" from Era Vulgaris with "Paper Machete" from In Times New Roman—illustrating that underneath the fuzz and thunder linger haunting psychedelic melodies wracked with a sense of self-recrimination. Although the band does build to a crushing crescendo on "Kalopsia," the performance is captivating due to its restraint. The small string section provides as much of an engine on Alive as the acoustic guitars; a plucked kalimba adds as much texture as an electric piano. The shift toward hushed, textured arrangements may merely reveal what lies beneath the surface in the original song but the statlieness of Alive in the Catacombs also suggests a path forward for Homme and Queens of the Stone Age, one where they can retain their mystique even if they shed their noisy, gnarled skin.