He’s wearing a dark shirt, dark jeans and leopard-print Vans and offers me a tea-tree-oil-infused toothpick - a reminder of his friend Hackford, who carried a little box of them at all times, according to Homme. “When you make music, you’re putting yourself out there, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to put myself out there,” he says as we sit at a picnic table in the park, not far from his home in Malibu. After the album was complete, Homme was diagnosed with cancer - he won’t specify which type - from which he’s since recovered following surgery. Released in June, the raw and jagged “In Times New Roman …” ponders a tumultuous few years in which Homme lost a number of close friends - among them Foo Fighters’ Taylor Hawkins, Mark Lanegan of Screaming Trees and actor and bar owner Rio Hackford - and engaged in a highly contentious custody battle with his ex-wife, Distillers frontwoman Brody Dalle, whom he divorced in 2019 after a decade and a half of marriage and with whom he shares a daughter and two sons ages 7 to 17. Yet Queens’ latest LP reveals a different side of this 50-year-old singer and multi-instrumentalist. You catch each other’s eye in the middle of a jam and just start laughing.” There’s always an element of ‘Watch this…’ that makes it so exciting when you begin a song together - like you’re playing a trick on the audience. “He’s endlessly creative and legit funky. “Josh has such a natural, deep-rooted feel in everything he does,” Grohl tells The Times. Formed in the mid-1990s out of the ashes of Kyuss, the pioneering stoner-metal group Homme assembled as a teenager in his native Palm Desert, Queens broke out in 2000 with “Rated R,” which opened with a chugging number called “ Feel Good Hit of the Summer” whose only lyrics went, “Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol” since then, the band has stayed busy in the studio and on the road even as Homme has pursued side projects including Eagles of Death Metal and Them Crooked Vultures (the latter a power trio with Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters and Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones) and produced albums by Iggy Pop and Arctic Monkeys.

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