Most bands announce an album by giving you a date. Queens of the Stone Age gave everyone a date on 15 August, then took a knife to it inside the same ninety-second clip.
The teaser is called “Coming…soon?” and the question mark is doing real work. By the time it ends, the band has a confirmed ninth studio album called Perfecth, a release date of September 30 read aloud on camera, and that same date visibly crossed out. Both things are true, which is roughly the most Queens of the Stone Age way to run a campaign.
Ninety Seconds That Announced and Unannounced a Record
The clip is built around five finger fillet, the bar game where you stab a knife between your spread fingers as fast as you dare. Josh Homme and guitarist-keyboardist Dean Fertita take turns. Fertita is good at it. Homme is not, and the video does not spare anyone the consequences.
Between rounds, Fertita asks when the record is coming. “September 30th, I think,” Homme answers, which is already a strange amount of hedging for a man reading his own release date. A voice-over then does the job properly, naming the band, the album and the date. Then Homme puts the knife through his own hand, passes out, and the date gets struck through and swapped for “coming soon.” Exclaim! described the result as very bloody, which undersells it slightly.
All of this is deliberate. The same promotional push included an online complaint line, an actual channel for people to register their grievances with the band. Taken together, the two ideas describe a campaign built to be talked about rather than to be efficient: no artwork drop, no orderly countdown, no press release with a bolded date. A band nine albums in does not stumble into that. It chooses it, and it works, because a straightforward announcement of a September record would have been read and forgotten inside an afternoon.
Why September 30 Never Looked Like a Real Date
Here is the detail that makes the gag land for anyone who follows release schedules: September 30, 2026 is a Wednesday. New albums land on Fridays, and have done globally since the industry standardised on it in 2015. A Wednesday date on a major rock record is not a plan, it is a punchline. The nearest actual Friday is October 2.
So the crossing-out may be less chaos than it looks. Either the band is telling you the date is soft, or the date was never the point and the joke was. Consequence noted the same Wednesday problem when the teaser landed, and no firm date has replaced it since.
Easy Street Was the First Real Signal
The album has not arrived unannounced musically. “Easy Street” came out in July through Matador and functions as the campaign’s first single: loose, psychedelic and closer to a sing-along than anything on the last record. Its video, fittingly, also involves a lot of blood.
The song had a life before the release, too. It was played live during the band’s autumn 2025 run and stayed in the setlist, so a chunk of the audience already knew it by the time it appeared on streaming. That is a quietly confident way to introduce new material, and it suggests Perfecth has been finished, or close to it, for a while.
It also brought a guest along. Country singer-songwriter Nikki Lane appears on the track, a pairing that says something about where the record might sit tonally; Lane’s voice pulls toward dust and twang rather than the desert-rock heaviness the band is usually filed under. NME covered the reveal video in full, and the through-line between that single and the teaser is consistent: this campaign is funnier and looser than the last one was.
What Alive in the Catacombs Changed
Between albums the band did something genuinely unusual. Alive in the Catacombs paired a live EP with video shot in a setting no rock band books, and it became the seed of an orchestral tour that ran through April and May. Stripped arrangements, no stadium volume, songs rebuilt rather than replayed.
That project matters to how you should hear the new one. A band that has just spent a season reinterpreting its own catalogue acoustically tends not to come back with a carbon copy of the last album, and “Easy Street” already points somewhere lighter and stranger than In Times New Roman… did.
Three Years On From In Times New Roman
In Times New Roman… arrived in 2023 as the eighth Queens of the Stone Age album, and it was a heavy, sour, deliberately unglamorous record made in the aftermath of a genuinely difficult period for Homme. Whatever Perfecth turns out to be, it follows that.
The gap is now three years, which is short by this band’s recent standards and long enough that the audience has stopped assuming. Long silences and their endings have become a recurring rock story lately, from reunions to solo returns like Tony Iommi breaking a 21-year gap between solo albums, and a three-year turnaround reads almost brisk against that.
The Stadium Run Sitting on Top of the Release
There is a scheduling reason a September date is awkward beyond the day of the week. The band is currently out as support on a North American stadium tour that opened on 4 August in Toronto and runs into September, so the announced release window sits directly on top of a run of stadium shows.
Playing new material to stadium crowds ahead of a record is good promotion. Releasing the record mid-tour, without the usual release-week press cycle to build around it, is harder. That alone is a plausible reason for the date to have been floated, mocked and left open. There is also a late-2026 Australian and New Zealand run in the diary, with Primus along for it, which pushes the practical release window further out than September in any case.
The pairing on the American dates is not a booking accident either. Dave Grohl has framed the two bands touring together as an acknowledgement of a friendship that goes back to 1992, long before either act was filling stadiums. For Queens of the Stone Age it means playing to rooms far larger than they headline alone, in the weeks immediately before a new album. That is either the best promotional slot available or the worst release-week schedule imaginable, depending on how much you care about first-week numbers.
What to Actually Watch For Now
Three things will tell you more than any teaser. A second single is the clearest signal that a real date is close, because campaigns rarely go from one song to an album without another in between. A pre-order going live with a track listing would confirm the record is genuinely mastered and scheduled. And a Friday, most likely October 2 or later, is what an actual date will look like when it comes.
Until then, what exists is the title, one single, a bleeding hand and a struck-through Wednesday. For a band that ran an online complaint line as part of the same promotional push, that is not a campaign going wrong. It is a campaign behaving exactly as designed, and Queens of the Stone Age have never much minded making the audience wait for the part everyone else gives away first.
This article was AI-assisted and edited for accuracy.
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