“Where the Goth Girls At?” is the striking third single from Queens of the Stone Age’s ninth studio album, Perfecth. The track pairs raw, minimalist riffs with an explosive chorus, amplified by rich string and horn arrangements. Drawing on inspiration and nostalgia from Josh Homme’s youth in a Palm Desert suburb, the song centers on themes of teenage love and the desire to impress others.
About the song, Homme says, “Watching the goth girls working the counter at JCPenney and giving goth makeovers to the old ladies, that’s when I knew the only place I want to be is where the goth girls at. Teenage love, ain’t it grand?”
The video for the song finds the band reunited with “Easy Street” video directors Christopher Gruse & Tony Wolski, and features comedian Steve Agee, dancer/artist Scarlett Kapella, singer/actress Lou Lou Safran, Queens band members, and copious amounts of black ink. Against the backdrop of a deserted power plant, the goth girls command authority and self-assurance as they transform everyone they encounter into their ultimate form.
Produced by Homme and band member Michael Shuman, Perfecth can be pre-ordered HERE. It was made in the spirit of Kintsugi — the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by filling its cracks with gold, which holds that what has been shattered is made more beautiful, not less, by the act of repair. It’s an album that could only have been made right now thanks to Homme, Troy Van Leeuwen, Michael Shuman, Dean Fertita, and Jon Theodore taking significant evolutionary steps as a collective and arriving at hard-won clarity, its nine songs map different forms of love: of family, friends, and others both significant and insignificant. The loves that break you beyond survival and the loves that put you back together.
Birthed from sessions tracked everywhere from New Orleans to Los Angeles, the music is fearless and boundless, moody and menacing, gentle and strange. Here, Queens have moved a career’s worth of jagged pieces into alignment. “Every song sounds like it’s from a different world,” says Homme. “And that’s on purpose, because it’s trying to stitch together all these emotions revolving around love, lust, foolishness, and the sort of wisdom that comes as a gift from all that.”
Queens of the Stone Age resumed their North American stadium tour with Foo Fighters on Sept. 15 and also recently announced a fall headline run in Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Singapore. Newly announced is a March 6, 2027 show at Mexico City’s Estadio Ciudad de los Deportes with Interpol. More headline shows in the new year will be announced in the coming weeks. Sign up at qotsa.com to be the first to receive updates.
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