Villains

This is the band's seventh album, produced by Mark Ronson and released by Matador Records on 25 August 2017. It was announced on 14 June with a teaser in the form of a comedy skit in which Liam Lynch puts the band through a polygraph test, and the first single, "The Way You Used to Do", followed the next day along with a world tour. It is the first Queens of the Stone Age album with no guest musicians at all, the second without Mark Lanegan and the first with Jon Theodore as a full-time drummer. It is also the second part of the trilogy they made for Matador, which began with ...Like Clockwork in 2013 and closed with In Times New Roman... in 2023. Ronson changed how the rhythm is handled, bringing the pulse of dance music into the riffs. There are nine songs, all built on hard-edged repetition, with Josh Homme's singing gliding over them. The closing "Villains of Circumstance" had been played years earlier: Homme premiered it in 2014 at an acoustic concert for James Lavelle's Meltdown Festival. The album went to number one on the UK chart, the band's first British number one, and to three on the Billboard 200 while topping Top Alternative Albums and Top Rock Albums. It was nominated for best rock album at the 2018 Grammy Awards.