Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme Talks Health Crisis That Scuttled 2024 Tour and Spending ‘Seven Months in Bed’

Eleven months ago, Queens of the Stone Age cancelled all the remaining dates on their 2024 tour to allow singer Josh Homme to focus on his health. At the time, they said “Josh has been given no choice but to prioritize his health and to receive essential medical care through the remainder of the year.”

The announcement came just weeks after QOTSA were forced to cancel a run of European dates so Homme could undergo emergency surgery for an unspecified medical condition. Now, Homme is opening up about the period before the scuttled dates and the lengthy recovery from the medical emergency he suffered just as the band was about to tick off a 20-year bucket list item: recording a live set in the legendary Catacombs of Paris.

Speaking to Consequence of Sound, Homme said that last July he was hit with another health crisis — he has not yet specified what it was for privacy’s sake — which put the quest to perform the subterranean set in jeopardy. And while they made the hard decision to stay in Paris and lay down the set that became their recent EP and short film, Alive in the Catacombs, he told CoS that less than a day after laying down the set he was flown back to the U.S. and sedated for emergency surgery that forced the cancellation of the 2024 tour.

Those medical crises came on top of previous health struggles for Homme, 52, who has also shared that he had surgery for an undisclosed cancer after being diagnosed in 2022.

“I was in a very difficult physical spot, and I’m really thankful that I was, actually,” Homme said of the hard choice he faced to either abandon his dream or push through the pain. “I couldn’t think about anything else but where we were. It’s better that I was unwell, because I think if I was well, we would’ve maybe been more ‘California’ about it and thought ‘Man, it’s so cool to be here…’ And something about that kind of sucks.”

Homme said less than a day after the performance with a trio of string players he was being “sedated and put under,” after which he spent “the next seven months in bed. I had a lot of time to think, you know? I was told I was gonna spend 18 months, two years there, so I was not excited.”

Following the long recovery period, Homme said by December, his doctors told him he was going to be okay, at which point he was raring to get back out on the road. “I felt like a rodeo bull leaning on the gate,” he said. “It’s like, when you open this f–king gate, I’m gonna run. I’m gonna run.”

After that long lay-off, Homme and the band will crank their live machine back up in the fall for the stripped-down Catacombs Tour, which will hit theaters on a North American run beginning on Oct. 2 with a show at the Chicago Theatre following an upcoming string of European dates in August.