Queens Of The Stone Age frontman Josh Homme has shared the news that he was diagnosed with cancer in 2022, and is still in the process of recovering.
Homme recently spoke to Revolver Magazine about the band’s return to music, after “the darkest four years” of the singer’s life.
"I think this is the first time I didn't want to make a record, but I was dealing with a lot of stuff in my personal life," Homme said.
"We recorded a lot of stuff. I think I was doing it because when I'm in trouble, this is what I do. This is where I go to get right."
Over the last four years, the singer has had to deal with the death of close friends, a divorce with former-wife Brody Dalle in 2019, which was followed by a lengthy, public child custody case. The following year, COVID-19 shut the world down, and last year, Homme was diagnosed with cancer.
Homme didn’t want to get into too many details about the cancer diagnosis, but said he had a successful surgery last year that he’s still healing from.
"Cancer is just the cherry on top of an interesting time period, you know? I'm extremely thankful that I'll get through this, and I'll look back at this as something that's fucked up, but will have made me better,” he said.
“I'm cool with that. There's a lot of stuff I want to do. And there's a lot of people I want to do that with."
Speaking more in detail about his mental state, the singer said he “definitely had a serious case of emotion sickness.”
"There were times I almost didn't make it. It's okay for me to ruminate on that. It's not okay to stay there, feel too sorry for myself…
“… In the heartaches, my mistakes, these deaths and my own physical things I'm dealing with — even though all that has occurred and smashed my old life to pieces, those pieces I've been able to build into a ship that's about to launch. I will float into my new life from all those pieces."
That ship he’s about to launch is Queens Of The Stone Age’s forthcoming album In Times New Roman… which is set to drop this Friday (June 16). You can pre-order that here now.
