10 Huge Rock Albums That Didn't Deserve To Flop
6. Era Vulgaris - Queens of the Stone Age
You can definitely hear Queens of the Stone Age starting to struggle with their identity after the Songs for the Deaf era. Once Nick Oliveri and Mark Lanegan left the fold after their masterpiece, Joshua Homme definitely had some concerns about being the full time leader of the band, bringing in as many guests as he could to make sure that he kept himself grounded. Since this was Josh's band now, it was also time to get a little bit weird as well.
Coming from his stoner rock roots, Era Vulgaris might be the closest that Josh has come to capturing what he described as 'robot rock,' with guitars and vocal lines that feel like machinery that's short circuiting in your headphones. Though this did give us some of the greatest single cuts in the Queens catalog like 3's and 7's and Make It Wit Chu, the rest of the album is a lot darker than what those have to offer, capturing a certain menace that hadn't been seen in their music since Rated R.
The identity of this album might be scattered, but the whole thing starts to make more sense when Josh said that Trent Reznor was originally supposed to have a hand in production this time around. Hearing the type of machine like noise on some of these songs, it would have fit perfectly with the Nine Inch Nails' signature style had they actually been able to get their schedules locked in. Still, the fact that we have rock and roll horror tracks like Sick Sick Sick is enough for most fans to know that this idea wasn't just a pipedream.