Queens of the Stone Age — In Times New Roman… — Album Review
Rock
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Queens of the Stone Age have been a band that I have had a mild kind of sentimentality towards. While I have enjoyed quite the chunk of their older material, I have generally found myself finding the band kind of… just… OK.
Nevertheless, my hope that a new album from the Seattle rock band would match the excellence of projects like the critically acclaimed …Like Clockwork, and my personal favourite, Songs for the Deaf.
Between the times that those aforementioned albums arrived and now, I did get chance to skim over the band’s 2017 album Villains, which I discovered while attending the Reading Festival that took place that very year, as part of a unknown promotion towards their secret set, which I managed to catch, and also enjoy.
Funnily enough, we wouldn’t get another album from Queens of the Stone Age until almost six years later. That’s right; the bands eighth and newest studio album is finally here, and is named In Times New Roman….
Through the aforementioned Villains, there were certainly signs of the band mellowing out their sound to be as typically “rock” inspired as possible, leading the albu to receive a generally poor reception from critics and listeners alike. And I was hoping that the heat would be turned back up through In Times New Roman…. However, if anything, the band have only fallen further into that rabbit-hole.
While there is a select handful of enjoyable moments, In times New Roman… is arguably the most predictable and baseline album I have listened to from the band. The predominant sonic feel that this album has is rife with your run of the mill guitar riffs, which ultimately feels like a similar thing to why bands like Royal Blood get so much flack for being uninteresting and “samey”; this album gives off exactly that.
Even though lead singer Josh Homme has seemingly injected a lot of Bowie elements into his vocals this time around, which arguably sound similar to his natural vocals anyway, it doesn’t quite do enough to carry the uninteresting weight that this album has.
It’s not a bad album by any stretch of the imagination, but it hardly has anything to really make it stand out as a staple of the musical year of 2023 whatsoever.
I would actually say that the most interesting thing about this album is all the visual branding that has gone into the cover art, and the marketing for it. However, that makes it all the more disappointing when the music itself does not match that uniqueness at all.
And thus, In Times New Roman… stands as a very difficult album for me to review, as there’s only so much that I can say about it (not to mention that I have been astronomically busy the past few weeks). To no fault of the band, I might add, the fact that I have put this album review off for so long that I am now running behind has only soured my mood towards the album more.
In short, In Times New Roman… only adds to the band’s discography in the sense of quantity, and not quality. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll find myself remembering this album too fondly, once the musical year of 2023 draws to a close.
Favourite Tracks: Paper Machete | What the Peephole Say
Least Favourite Tracks: Negative Space | Made to Parade
Matador Records
