Josh Homme, who likes a pun, sings about “emotion sickness” twice on the eighth Queens of the Stone Age album. There’s a single with that title, which finds the American hard rock band adding some cute three-part harmonies to their violent riffing. The phrase also appears in the earlier song Negative Space, a darker melody on which Homme sings: “My love will not survive/ Emotion sickness, I wanna die.”
He probably returns to it because the past few years have sent the 50-year-old reeling from events in his personal life. Multiple close friends have died in their fifties, the best known being Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, grunge pioneer Mark Lanegan and the actor Rio Hackford. Over the past few years he has divorced and engaged in an ongoing custody battle over his three children with the rock musician Brody Dalle – a process so contentious and convoluted that this album was sent to reviewers with an accompanying 700-word media statement from Homme on the situation. Then this month he revealved in an interview that he is recovering from surgery on an unspecified cancer: “Just the cherry on top of an interesting time period.”
