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Queens of the Stone Age’s first new album in six years! Wow, six years, where have you been? Why such a long wait!? Lets start getting the next record out before I turn 100! The CD did well, with first-week sales of 91,000. That is not bad for a six year wait, and Josh Homme hopes the wait is much shorter for then the next one.

“I think we should make a record right away — but I think we’ll know when that is,” Homme tells Billboard. “The future is always out there, isn’t it? As soon as everyone looks to the left, we’ll show up from the right hand side. I mean, that’s what we’re supposed to do, right? Isn’t that the minimum obligation of a band, to try to enthrall and surprise and, with as much mystery as possible, appear to its fans. We’re supposed to walk first; we’re not supposed to take a CNN poll.”

Homme said QOTSA worked on 19 songs for the album with 10 making it to the actual record. As to the potential future for the other nine, however, they have no clue where the other music is going to go.

Homme and company are perfectly happy to revel a bit about the release. Homme has recently come out of a long depression he suffered following complications from knee surgery that had occurred in 2010. Homme says the albums represents:

“kind of the tightest, bond-wise across the board, we’ve ever been. Everyone trusts each other. Everybody has each other’s backs, and I think that solidarity really helped to sort of stabilize the sort of more vulnerable moments of the record.”

Old bandmates come back into the works, with everyone contributing:

“He’s obsessed with chasing down new music and understanding what’s going on. He said, ‘Josh, it’s Elton,’ and I said, ‘I know.’ He said, ‘No, it’s Elton John,’ and I said, ‘I know.’ And literally as I said ‘I know,’ a text came in from my old roommate, ‘Dude, Elton’s gonna call you in five minutes,’ and I thought, ‘God, I really could’ve used that about 10 minutes ago,’ and it really just took off from there. It’s one of the few times someone’s reached out to us successfully. Usually its a ‘We’ll ask you if it’s OK’ situation.”

QOTSA begins a North American tour on Aug. 2 at Lollapalooza in Chicago. Homme says the group will be out well into 2014, but that the new music merits the activity. So go out to see QOTSA should be totally worth it.

“To be honest, it’s actually geared more to be played live,” he explains. “It sort of flowers open live. There’s songs like ‘Kalopsia’ that might be confusing to somebody, ’cause I don’t know what that is, but love it takes on a grander position. It’s meant to be played this way, so it’s been going good.”