Queens of the Stone Age are Dave Grohl’s heroes. Or so the Foo Fighters frontman, who plays drums on QOTSA’s upcoming sixth album, suggested in a glowing interview last week with BBC Radio 1’s Zane Lowe (via Blabbermouth).
“When you walk into a festival backstage with Queens of the Stone Age, it’s like, the record stops,” Grohl told Lowe in the brief phone interview, which starts around the 22:40 mark of the November 21 program. “People stop and they stare, and it’s like, Queens of the Stone Age are, without question, the baddest rock’n’roll band in the world.”
Grohl’s comments mostly focused on QOTSA’s 2002 Songs for the Deaf, on which he played drums with an anything-goes abandon he indicated will carry over to the forthcoming LP. “But with Queens of the Stone Age, like, there were no boundaries with that band, there were no limits with them,” he said of the decade-old album. “It was like, if you did something insane, do it more. And honestly, the new Queens of the Stone Age record, I’m playing drums on that, and I’ll do something so completely ridiculous, I’ll just, like, ‘There’s no way that Josh [Homme, QOTSA frontman] is going to let me do that,’ and he’ll say, ‘Do that for 45 seconds, over and over again, that’s become, like, the part of the song, now that is a big part of the song,’ and that’s the way they work.”
Grohl observed that Songs for the Deaf was a concept album, but didn’t say whether the new QOTSA record — which also features Trent Reznor — will follow suit. He did say that QOTSA’s “baddest rock’n’roll band in the world” status continues to this day, and that “when Songs for the Deaf, when that came out, it blew people’s minds, man, for real.” If the former Nirvana drummer’s latest collaboration with Homme and company is anything like his first, get ready for minds potentially being blown again.
