Opening Night, The Queens of the Stone Age Debut The Catacombs Tour In Chicago Setting A Haunting Night at The Chicago Theatre

Oct 03, 2025 admin_bitlc Features, Music News, Reviews 0

By: Harrison Kristoff

Queens of the Stone Age aren’t a band that typically deals in subtlety. For the past two decades, they’ve staked their reputation on bone-crushing riffs, swaggering grooves, and the kind of desert rock danger that makes you feel like you’re one speeding ticket away from damnation. But on opening night of their Catacombs Tour 2025 at The Chicago Theatre, Josh Homme and company stripped back the desert dust and went subterranean—emerging with a show that felt more like a twisted Vegas lounge act staged inside a haunted cathedral. Tonight, Queens of the Stone Age flip the script on what a rock spectacle can be and turned Chicago Theatre into a haunted lounge.

QOTSA have always thrived in contradiction equal parts sleazy and sophisticated, primal and polished, desert dust and neon haze. But in their latest chapter, Josh Homme has pulled the band into yet another strange, fascinating world: one draped in velvet and vibrating with the resonance of a string section.

Visually, the band has embraced the transformation. On stage, their usual shadowy rock-club aesthetic has given way to a mood somewhere between gothic opera and late-night cabaret.

The band grew for this tour as they now incorporated a string section and dark mild tone. The setlist dove deep into their catalog, but the presentation gave the old songs a whole new life. “Mosquito Song” arrived early in the second act, slowed slightly and crooned out by Homme with the poise of a jaded lounge singer, leaning against his mic stand. “The Vampyre of Time and Memory” slithered in under a haze of blood-red lights, its menacing bassline rumbling like footsteps in a dungeon. Even the usually explosive “…Like Clockwork” carried an eerie intimacy, lit only in cool blue glow and heavy fog that cloaked the band until silhouettes were all that remained.

Homme, adopting his now full-blown “Ginger Elvis” persona, played the role to perfection, half sinister showman, half washed-up crooner clawing his way back to the stage. Between songs, he prowled the edge of the orchestra pit, cracking sly jokes, tossing off sardonic one-liners, and at one point stepping into the crowd to serenade a stunned fan.

It was less rock star bravado and more unhinged lounge act, equal parts charming and unsettling. Especially with Homme waving around a meat cleaver like a psychotic conductor.

The production underscored this reimagining. The Chicago Theatre stage was drenched in alternating washes of crimson and icy blue, with thick fog rolling endlessly across the stage. At times, the band themselves were little more than ghostly outlines, instruments echoing from behind the curtain of mist. Unlike the usual Queens of the Stone Age arena spectacle—big riffs, big lights, big chaos—this show was theatrical, atmospheric, and downright creepy.

Highlights included a brooding take on “Spinning in Daffodils,” a ‘Them Crooked Vultures song played for the first time as QOTSA, and “Long Slow Goodbye” that closed the night like a descent into the underworld. For longtime fans, it was a startling reminder that Homme and Queens are never content to be a predictable rock band—they’re shapeshifters, always twisting their own mythology.

What makes the experiment work is restraint. The strings don’t drown out the band’s muscular riffs; they coil around them, like vines wrapping around ancient stone. It’s not a rock band pretending to be an orchestra it’s Queens of the Stone Age letting orchestral textures haunt their sound, the way desert wind howls through abandoned ruins.

On opening night in Chicago, the Catacombs Tour wasn’t just a concert. It was a séance, a fever dream, and a midnight Vegas revue gone wrong. And it proved that even 25 years on, Queens of the Stone Age can still surprise, seduce, and unsettle—all in the same breath. This was not a rock concert but a soul stirring jolt into the mind of Josh Homme.

For a group that has always thrived on reinvention, the addition of a string section feels less like a novelty and more like a natural evolution. It makes their music darker, stranger, more theatrical and perhaps closer than ever to the haunted cabaret vision Homme has been teasing for years.