Villains

Villains is the seventh studio album by American rock band Queens of the Stone Age, released on August 25, 2017 through Matador. The album was announced on June 14, with a teaser trailer taking the form of a comedy skit featuring the band performing a polygraph test with Liam Lynch. The first single, "The Way You Used to Do", was released the following day along with the announcement of a world tour. Villains is the first Queens of the Stone Age album to not feature any special guest musicians, the second to not feature Mark Lanegan, and the first to feature Jon Theodore as full time member of the band. The album received widely positive reviews and performed well commercially, topping Billboards Top Alternative Albums and Top Rock Albums charts. At the 2018 Grammy Awards ceremony, it was nominated for Best Rock Album, losing to The War on Drugs' A Deeper Understanding. Background and recording Several of the songs from the album were previewed in some form prior to its release. The album's final track, "Villains of Circumstance", was first premiered by Josh Homme in 2014 at an acoustic concert for James Lavelle's Meltdown Festival, while "The Evil Has Landed" was performed by the band during their first gig of 2017 on June 22 at The Rapids Theatre in Niagara Falls, New York. "The Evil Has Landed" was released as a single on August 10, 2017. In addition to this, several snippets of songs have been featured in teaser trailers released online in promotion of the album, including a short clip of the album's opening track, "Feet Don't Fail Me", as well as an a cappella from the intro to the same song. The album has been described as "a little looser and more uptempo than their last release ...Like Clockwork and "more carefree". Homme cites his interest in dancing, working with Mark Ronson, and Ronson's collaboration with Bruno Mars "Uptown Funk" for the direction of the album. Kory Grow of Rolling Stone notes, "While the guitars still have the limber crunch of Queens albums past, they're playing around easy-breezy disco beats and chilly synths on songs like "Feet Don't Fail Me" and "Un-Reborn Again."" The song "Un-Reborn Again" was seen as a nod to T. Rex by critics, with the lyrics "Scaredy nose Jack/ Scaredy nose Jack/ Knowing nothing about nothing" echoing T. Rex's "Telegram Sam" with the lines "Golden Nose Slim/ Golden Nose Slim/ I knows where you’ve been", a T. Rex influence that Homme mentioned during the promotion of the album.