Why Is QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE Called QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE?

Some band names lay their cards face-up, think of AC/DC, Kiss, Slayer… while others keep a little mystery. Queens Of The Stone Age has always sat in that second camp. In a new chat with Alternative Nation, Jesse Hughes, frontman of Eagles Of Death Metal and lifelong friend of Josh Homme, offered his reading of where the moniker comes from and what one of the band’s biggest songs might actually be saying.

Here’s how Hughes frames the name’s roots: “The thing about Queens Of The Stone Age is that I feel like I probably understood what was going on a little bit better than everyone else, because Queens Of The Stone Age is not a made-up name.”

“It’s an old gay community term, okay? And it means an uncool homosexual, a ‘queen of the stone age.’ Like, ‘Don’t invite him. He’s not even into Bowie. He likes Liberace. He’s a real queen of the stone age.'”

Taken at face value, that’s a cultural reference hiding in plain sight; a tongue-in-cheek, era-coded phrase turned into a banner for a band that’s always mixed swagger with side-eye. Whether you hear it as affectionate ribbing, reclaimed slang, or a provocation designed to short-circuit macho expectations, it adds a layer to a name that once seemed purely enigmatic.

Hughes didn’t stop at the name. He also waded into song meaning, specifically Queens Of The Stone Age‘s breakout hit “No One Knows”:

“I know what the song’s about. I know what a lot of these songs are about – what they’re actually about,” Hughes admitted. “And they’re heavy, very hard-hitting, deep critiques of people in his personal life that are brutal sometimes – in the manner in which they’re taking down their subject matter.”

“But ‘No One Knows’ is a beautiful way to say, ‘Please keep a secret.’ If you listen to it now again and think in your head, ‘Keep a secret,’ you’ll hear that it’s an instruction manual.”

It’s a striking gloss on a track fans often read as surreal or existential. Reframing it as a quiet directive – “keep a secret” – shifts the song’s tension inward. Suddenly, the push-and-pull in those grooves feels like the rhythm of discretion, not just desert-rock hypnosis. Whether or not you buy every inference, Hughes‘s take lines up with how Homme writes at his sharpest: elliptical lyrics that double as character studies and veiled missives.

The two artists’ shared history gives the comments more weight than idle speculation. Hughes and Homme launched Eagles Of Death Metal in 1998, with Homme hopping behind the kit (among other instruments) and bringing that loose-limbed, fuzzed-up feel into a different lane. The project’s most recent studio record, Zipper Down (2015), even spun off a sleeper hit via a cover of Duran Duran‘s “Save a Prayer”.

So, where does that leave us, who have listened to Queens Of The Stone Age for countless years? Well, if you’re part of the wider rock/metal crowd that loves them for sandblasted riffs and sideways hooks, Hughes‘s remarks offer a useful prompt: listen back with theme and tone in mind, not just texture. And even if you ultimately decide that “No One Knows” resists any single reading (and it probably does), treating it as an “instruction manual” makes for a compelling re-spin.