Can you feel it in your bones? There’s a new Queens of the Stone Age concert film coming our way, and it was filmed deep within France’s famed and cavernous Catacombs of Paris. The desert rock group’s tellingly titled Queens of the Stone Age: Alive in the Catacombs will be streaming June 5th.
Queens had filmed a set in the ossuary last July during a European leg of their “The End is Nero” world tour. A press release explains that the set comprises reimagined Queens cuts from across their catalogue, which were performed while surrounded by the chilling and ornate, bones-laden walls of the Catacombs, a 200-mile tunnel system running beneath the streets of Paris that is lined with the skeletal remains of “several million bodies buried in the 1700s.”
Guitarist-vocalist Josh Homme had conceived of a concert taking place with the Catacombs when he’d visited Paris more than 20 years ago. Up until last summer, city officials had never granted artists the permission to perform and film inside the Catacombs, so QOTSA being granted the opportunity to do so makes the concert quite a special event.
“It is important to us that artists take hold of this universe and offer a sensitive interpretation of it,” Les Catacombes de Paris representative Hélène Furminieux said in a statement. “Going underground and confronting reflections on death can be a deeply intense experience. Josh seems to have felt in his body and soul the full potential of this place. The recordings resonate perfectly with the mystery, history, and a certain introspection, notably perceptible in the subtle use of the silence within the Catacombs.”
A trailer reveals that the songs were reimagined with a string section, though the arrangements are also apparently marked by the sounds of “dripping water, echoes and natural resonance.” The band are definitely not blaring through a set with loud-as-fuck desert rock, lest they want to cause a bone-valanche.
“We’re so stripped down because that place is so stripped down, which makes the music so stripped down, which makes the words so stripped down,” Homme said. “It would be ridiculous to try to rock there. All those decisions were made by that space. That space dictates everything, it’s in charge. You do what you’re told when you’re in there.”
While a full setlist has yet to be revealed, the trailer teases low-key, haunted takes on In Times New Roman…’s “Paper Machete,” Lullabies to Paralyze’s “I Never Came” and more.
Queens of the Stone Age: Alive in the Catacombs was produced by longtime on-location concert documentarians La Blogothèque and directed by Thomas Rames. The film arrives June 5th via Queens of the Stone Age and Matador Records, and will be available to rent or purchase via qotsa.com.
An audio-only version of the Catacombs performance is apparently on the way, too, though those details will be announced at a later date.