Hollywood has seen drama. It has seen spectacle. It has seen art, artifice, and enough theatrics to fill a thousand lifetimes. But nothing could prepare the Dolby Theatre for the Catacombs Tour, Queens of the Stone Age’s velvet-draped, shadow-soaked, fully unhinged night of rock-opera sorcery, wherein longtime band leader Josh Homme played ringmaster, pallbearer, gremlin king, and maître d’ of madness all at once.
What began as a concert film shot deep in the Paris Catacombs—the eerie, candlelit Alive in the Catacombs—has now been reborn as a roving theater piece: QOTSA in suits, fans dressed to the nines, strings and brass lining the wings, spooky shadows and dim candlelight, and 13 musicians interlocking like gears in some decadent, undead machine. The band promised a show unlike anything they’d ever done. They undersold it.
Even some celebs turned out for the Los Angeles stop, including one-time QOTSA drummer Dave Grohl, Chad Smith from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and comedian W. Kamau Bell.
But before QOTSA cracked open the crypt door, the evening opened with something quieter, stranger, and perfect for the mood.
Armed with only an acoustic guitar and the kind of unfiltered candor that makes an entire theater lean forward, Paris Jackson delivered a stark, shadowy set of songs from her upcoming Linda Perry collab album.
“All my songs are either about drugs or boys,” she joked, “sometimes both,” before sliding into dark-petaled confessionals like “Zombies in Love”, “Something”, and a chilling tune about gaslighting introduced with, “Who here has been gaslit before? If you have, this one’s for you.”
There wasn’t a happy song in sight from Michael Jackson’s daughter, and the audience, as she wryly noted, were “sick fucks” for loving every minute.
Not long after Paris stepped offstage, the lights dimmed as the sound of crickets chirping filled the home of the Oscars. One lone bulb dangled around the stage, swinging in Josh Homme’s hand as he slinked forward, casting a monstrous silhouette behind him like Nosferatu after a night out in Silver Lake.
A string trio glowed faintly as QOTSA emerged onstage, piece by piece. They opened with a spectral intertwining of “Running Joke / Paper Machete”, the arrangements skeletal, woozy, and dripping with noir.
Then came the deep cuts, like deep-beneath-the-streets-of-Paris cuts. “Kalopsia” kicked the show into full heartbreak opera mode. “Villains of Circumstance” emerged reimagined as a chamber dirge. For “Suture Up Your Future”, the players slimmed down to just Josh—singing like a man picking at stitches he knows will never heal—alongside the three-piece string section and Dean Fertita on keys. “I Never Came” was so intimate as to feel like the audience had stumbled into a ritual they weren’t supposed to witness.
If Act I was a slow, seductive descent, Act II kicked open the ossuary.
A disembodied Homme voice floated over the PA, someplace between confession, monologue, and cult-leader welcome. Suddenly, the curtains drew back to reveal a full string and brass section as the band burst into a haunting medley of “Someone’s in the Wolf / A Song for the Deaf / Straight Jacket Fitting”.
The arrangements? Cinematic, bombastic, and unhinged. Josh? Even more so.
He teased the crowd about dressing up, then launched into “Mosquito Song”, wandering the aisles waving a meat cleaver like a desert-dwelling Sweeney Todd.
“Keep Your Eyes Peeled” throbbed with sousaphone-level bass. “Spinning in Daffodils”—a gem from Them Crooked Vultures that Grohl certainly appreciated—bloomed into a psych-drone waltz as Homme and bassist Michael Shuman danced the macabre. During another sojourn into the crowd, Josh wet his whistle with a swig from a fan’s drink mid-song.
This was the Catacombs Tour at full, glorious, gothic tilt.
After another voiceover, the orchestra faded, the band tightened, and suddenly the whole room was vibrating with a more familiar QOTSA swagger.
They ripped open with “You Got a Killer Scene There, Man…” before easing into an orchestral-rock hybrid that truly justified this whole experiment. Homme launched into a monologue about finding one’s spark at any age, making “strange requests” after enough booze, and how tonight they’d play whatever the hell they felt like.
Josh Homme: “It doesn’t matter when you get a spark; it matters that you get one.”
[Video: Tamara Grace]
Thus began the “choose your nightmare” portion of the evening. “Hideaway” came in dripping with midnight menace. For “The Vampyre of Time and Memory”, Homme commanded the piano, smoking casually through Dean’s guitar solo like a man at the world’s sexiest funeral. “Auto Pilot” offered an opportunity for Shuman to shine on lead vocals
Homme introduced a new song, “Easy Street”, with a speech about anger, acceptance, and making peace with your ghosts, and closed it out by leading the crowd in a full-theatre chorale. He dedicated a heavy, haunted “Fortress” to his daughter, Camille. QOTSA closed out the third act with “…Like Clockwork”, the band sounding like they’d gathered every ghost from the Paris catacombs to sing backing vocals. Before stepping offstage, Homme, in his typically disarming sarcasm, introduced the orchestra as “the people who bow and blow.”
The encore was equal parts comedy set, group therapy and séance. Homme riffed for minutes, praising L.A., reminiscing about bandmates lost, shouting out Nick Oliveri’s birthday, swearing the band had “58 more minutes” if we wanted them, half‐joking, half-not.
Then the lights fell still for “Long Slow Goodbye”, with just Josh and Michael singing a capella.
Queens of the Stone Age left Hollywood with this truth carved into the Dolby Theatre walls: they are not a nostalgia act. They are not retreating. They are evolving, mutating, becoming something stranger, darker, funnier, more theatrical, and more alive than ever.
QOTSA will close out the Catacombs Tour with dates in Austin, TX on November 19th and New Orleans, LA on November 21st.
Come summer of 2026, they will join System of a Down and Acid Bath for a European run that already feels apocalyptic.
There’s also that unreleased material (“Easy Street” onstage, “Insignificant Other” teased in the Catacombs film) that suggests a new album may be creeping out of the crypt sooner than later.
Until then, Los Angeles will be talking about this one for a long, long time.
Longer, perhaps, than the mere mortals who witnessed it will hang around.
Queens Of The Stone Age – Dolby Theatre – Los Angeles, CA – 11/11/25 [Video Playlist]
[Videos: Todd Norris]
Queens Of The Stone Age – Dolby Theatre – Los Angeles, CA – 11/11/25
[Video: Tamara Grace]
