Alive in the Catacombs - EP

Album ∙ Alternative ∙ 2025

Queens of the Stone Age

In July 2024, Queens of the Stone Age descended underneath Paris for a unique unplugged performance to an audience of six million...corpses. Founder Joshua Homme says his interest in the city’s famous catacombs began in childhood and it became a dream to play there. “Obviously, in the simplest terms, there’s a bunch of bodies and they’re stacked in a certain manner,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe.

Recording in a subterranean cemetery filled with over six million skeletal remains proved challenging, but Homme had a “desire for it to have this improv element to it.” Ultimately, the morbid setting helped turn their hard rock anthems into haunting, acoustic balladry. “It’s very ASMR in there,” he says. “When you’re playing something that’s stripped down to the bones, and I guess in front of people that are stripped to the bones too, it just felt intuitively like this should be [like] there’s almost nothing being performed. Everything is more important somehow. When you’re doing that, the ceiling’s dripping and the camera people were walking and it’s crunching on the ground, it becomes part of the performance.”

The songs on the EP date back from 2005’s Lullabies to Paralyze (“I Never Came”) to 2023’s In Times New Roman... (“Paper Machete”), befitting a catalog that, over the course of nearly three decades, has had no shortage of songs that would lend themselves to sparse funeral dirges. (For reasons only Homme can explain, 2002’s “Song for the Dead” is not among them.) In place of loud guitars and drums are mournful strings and understated percussion; Homme’s soulful wail, however, needs no reinvention for the venue.

But in this instance, the music itself isn’t the main draw for Homme. “The bigger truth is that the catacombs is so the protagonist,” he says. “It’s so overwhelming that we’re also there and we’re playing, but it felt like at all times that we were just serving this audience, which really deserved attention. People are viewing it a bit like a zoo in a way, but this was like, ‘I brung something for you. I got you this thing, and can I show it to you?’ It felt like we were having this moment together.”