Queens Of The Stone Age - Queens Of The Stone Age

When Kyuss fell apart in 1995, Josh Homme walked away from the band that had defined desert rock and spent the next few years figuring out what came after it. The answer arrived in 1998 on a small Seattle label: a debut built on locked, repetitive riffs that Homme called robot rock, trading the sprawl of his old band for something leaner, stranger and far more hypnotic.

Homme handled nearly everything himself, singing and playing the guitars and the bass, with former Kyuss drummer Alfredo Hernández supplying the swing behind him. "Regular John" opens the record on a riff that refuses to budge, "Avon" and "If Only" show the pop instincts hiding under the fuzz, and "Mexicola" and "You Can't Quit Me Baby" stretch out into the slow, heavy menace that would become a band signature. The guitars are thick and dry, the grooves are relentless, and the whole thing sounds like it was recorded in the middle of the night with the desert pressing in.

Everything Queens of the Stone Age did afterward starts here. The blueprint for Rated R and Songs for the Deaf is already in place, but the hazy, trance-like quality of this record is something Homme never quite returned to, which makes it a singular entry in the catalog.

This is the expanded 2011 edition, the version the band considers definitive, available on standard black vinyl from Matador for the first time. The 14-track set adds "The Bronze," "These Aren't the Droids You're Looking For" and "Spiders and Vinegaroons" to the original album, spread across two LPs with the original cover artwork restored, in a gatefold jacket with printed inner sleeves.