Queens of the Stone Age Return With 'Run Away From the Mob' — Five New Tracks That Matter

Queens of the Stone Age close their new album "Perfecth" with "Run Away From the Mob," a song built on parts recorded 20 years ago with Dave Grohl on drums. The track, reviewed by Jon Pareles of The New York Times, opens with a spindly, low-fi acoustic guitar and ends with an attempted reassurance — "I'm right there wherever you are" — that, in Pareles's assessment, still "sounds far from invincible."

The album is deliberately bare-bones and live-sounding, as if made before the era of infinite digital overdubs. "Run Away From the Mob" warns against brainwashing and bloodthirsty groupthink. It anchors a week of notable releases that also includes new work from Snoh Aalegra, Everything but the Girl, Sampa the Great and Diiv.

What does the new Queens of the Stone Age album sound like?

"Perfecth" strips the band's sound back to essentials. The closing song pairs its lo-fi acoustic opening with Grohl's drumming, recorded two decades back. The arc is unusual: it crests at the end, but the reassurance on offer remains fragile. A song about resisting the crowd ends by admitting the crowd's pull.

Which other artists released tracks this week?

• Snoh Aalegra, "I Love You." The Iranian-Swedish singer works a beat positioned between Prince's guitar-scrubbing funk and 21st-century Afrobeats. The song declares unconditional, loyal affection: "I want this forevermore," she promises. Pareles calls it a song for the dance floor at countless weddings to come.
• Everything but the Girl, "Young and Dumb." Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt have made music together since 1982. Here they set aside their longtime, club-friendly electronics for a restrained, unplugged bossa nova about maturity and mortality. Thorn, "older and wiser," looks back on a feckless youth, asks "Where did the wildness go?" and admits, "I'd give up all the wisdom to be young and dumb again." The song comes from "Blue Reservoir," an album due in February.
• Sampa the Great, "Location." Born in Zambia and raised in Botswana, the rapper claims her own genre on "Nu Zamrock": rapping over the guitar and horn riffs of Zamrock, Zambia's early-1970s answer to psychedelia. Her uncle George Kunda was a founder of a top Zamrock band, Witch. In rapid-fire triplets, "Location" addresses African music's global reach and meager reward: "Don't own all your art / Then it's all just the same."
• Diiv, "The Fountain." The guitar band, known for orchestrating songs with gusts of distortion, chose an unexpected producer for "Zirp!": A.G. Cook, the hyperpop pioneer and Charli XCX collaborator. Cook did not impose digital crispness. The opening track marches out of a staticky haze with bent guitar notes and blurry cymbals, while the lyrics weigh whether to "tear it up and start again" and warn, "There's poison in the fountain of youth."

What does this week tell us about where guitar music is heading?

Veteran acts and newer names alike are rejecting maximalist production. Queens of the Stone Age reach back two decades for raw takes; Everything but the Girl trade electronics for an unplugged bossa nova; Diiv hire a hyperpop producer and still emerge in a haze. The through-line is restraint, and February's "Blue Reservoir" will test whether that mood holds.