R

In a year where Miss Selfridge is flogging Motorhead t-shirts and heavy rock's most talked-about proponents are sportzmetallers with masks and vomiting fetishes, where to next? is an increasingly valid question. Tuneful, opiated and complex, Queens Of The Stone Age are looking increasingly like the answer.

R has a weightiness, a feet-on-the-ground-ish, almost planetary gravity, that hearkens back to the days of 1970s classic rock, without that grrrowly turned-up-to-eleven prepubescent quality that has, since then, turned hard rock into a cliché. Sinewy and streamlined, but not over-polished or emasculated, the production is intelligent and the songwriting needle-sharp – and there's a relaxed we-don't-have-to-shout maturity to the riffs or possibly a too-stoned-to-fight laziness to them. Whichever, it’s brilliant.

There’s the one-chord-and-the-truth cardiac-adrenalin-injection of ‘Feel Good Hit of the Summer‚ (“Nicotine, valium/Vicodan, marijuana/Ecstasy and alcohol/Ccccccocaaaaine!”) and the screamy cheerleader hallucination of ‘Quick And To The Pointless’. There’s the unexpectedly gentle caravan comedown of ‘I Think I Lost My Headache’ and the eight-miles-high love missive of ‘Auto Pilot’. And there’s the stoned maelstrom of ‘Better Living Through Chemistry’‚ featuring a lyric borrowed from (wait for it) Björk.

Punk ferocity, dinosaur weight and a curious alt-rock subtlety and attention to detail: when you're this good, you don't need to wear masks.