Live music review: The seance will be televised – Queens of the Stone Age ACL TV taping

Marcel Proust was a dark-minded poet-philosopher, once musing: “Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.” Imagine him at a Parisian café with Queens of the Stone Age mastermind Josh Homme, trading cigarettes and wine. Would they challenge death or toast to it? These thoughts and more came as QOTSA’s Austin City Limits TV taping took place on November 18 at ACL Live. 

Like Proust, Homme is obsessed with what time does to us — how beauty curdles into rot, how love and death share the same melody. Queens of the Stone Age, one of the biggest rock bands of their generation, has been touring in support of their cryptic masterpiece Alive in the Catacombs — a live performance of reimagined versions of their most unearthly material. The special places the band before seven million of Paris’s dead, playing for the bones beneath the streets. You can smell the wet stone, the air heavy with centuries of silence. Homme howls into the void as skeletal remains watch with judgeless eyes — rock and roll for the damned, echoing through the catacombs.

Twenty-five years into the band’s shape-shifting reign, Homme’s voice carries the rasp of someone who’s both survived and outlived his own mythology. The snarling hedonist of Songs for the Deaf has turned elegist — singing for ghosts, maybe even becoming one. The riffs hit like heartbeats trapped in stone, the reverb a sermon for whatever parts of us haven’t yet learned to rest.

The lights and atmosphere turned the venue into something uncanny: part cathedral, part fever dream. In interviews, Homme described Alive in the Catacombs as less a creative choice than a surrender to the space itself. “Being there was a great difficulty and required overcoming a lot just to walk down the steps,” he said. “So it felt like we’d earned the right to be there. That felt necessary somehow.” Once inside, the environment dictated everything: “We’re so stripped down because that place is so stripped down… It would be ridiculous to try to rock there. All those decisions were made by that space. That space dictates everything, it’s in charge.”

Homme, who battled cancer in 2022 and spent seven months bedridden after emergency surgery in 2024, recorded Alive in the Catacombs while standing at the edge of his own endurance. “Cancer is just the cherry on top of an interesting time period,” he told Revolver. “I’m extremely thankful that I’ll get through this, and I’ll look back at it as something that’s fucked up — but will have made me better.” Less than twenty-four hours after the Catacombs performance, he was flown back to the U.S. for an emergency procedure that forced the band to cancel their tour. Reflecting later, Homme said, “I was in a very difficult physical spot, and I’m really thankful that I was, actually… If I was well, we might’ve been more ‘California’ about it and thought, ‘Man, it’s so cool to be here’ — and something about that kind of sucks.” That context reframes Alive in the Catacombs not as spectacle, but as survival — the sound of a man dragging himself through the underworld and coming back changed.

Bringing their roadshow to Austin, the band delivered a lifetime performance for their third Austin City Limits appearance. Part theater, part danse macabre, the show blurred celebration and mourning — proof that honoring life can be as vital as grieving the past. For a packed room, you could hear every stomp, boot scrape, and drag of the microphone. The crowd stood transfixed; few howls, no chatter — only awe.

Onstage, Queens of the Stone Age became a living conjuration, channeling the banshees of their own catalog through a set that blurred violence and vulnerability. The lineup — Josh Homme on vocals and guitar, Troy Van Leeuwen on guitar and lap steel, Michael Shuman on bass, Dean Fertita on keys and rhythm guitar, and Jon Theodore on drums — sounded like a single organism breathing underground. They drifted between the sinister pulse of “Keep Your Eyes Peeled” and the spectral shimmer of “Suture Up Your Future,” before collapsing into the twisted lull of “I Never Came.” Somewhere between theater and ritual, the show stopped being a concert and became confession — for Homme, for the band, maybe for all of us.

Seven million skeletons can’t clap, but they bear witness. Down there, the sound is half reverb, half reckoning. That’s what Homme understands: every riff is a séance. In Alive in the Catacombs, he isn’t chasing catharsis — he’s chasing immortality. The same kind Proust found in memory: that looking backward is the only way to feel alive again. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s resurrection.

At this point in their nearly thirty-year career, Queens of the Stone Age are beyond contemporary cultural relevance — they’re chasing art. They’ll always fill a room, but now they’re testing the limits of what rock can mean. It takes a daring heart to make a record in a crypt and then take that morose carnival on the road. Most bands wouldn’t dare. They’d play the hits, charge a fortune, and stay safe in the status quo.

But Alive in the Catacombs is something else: devastation and melody in raw form. Austin City Limits TV gave the band room to recreate their uncompromising vision — tubas, maracas, even someone playing chains — and somehow made it feel grand, haunted, and alive. That’s what good art does: it doesn’t just demand attention, it demands reckoning. For one night, we bore witness to the cradle of death — and somehow, it was joyful.

In an era when everyone’s chasing the algorithm, this Austin City Limits performance will live alongside the Willie Nelson and Tom Waits sets — crown jewels because they’re timeless. This was one of those nights — sacred rock and roll voodoo. No scroll could ever give the quiet dopamine of Josh Homme crooning in the shadows, lit only by a work light shining against his pale skin.

Leaving the show, poster in hand, I wanted to remember that collective gasp. I walked out lighter, haunted.

Proust once wrote that the real voyage of discovery isn’t in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. Alive in the Catacombs gives us those eyes — peering past the living into something older, quieter, unafraid. Homme, like Proust, knows the truth: art doesn’t save us from death. It teaches us how to haunt ourselves beautifully.

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