Alternative Rock

Ten tracks to set newcomers on the road to QOTSA fandom. 

The sixth studio album from Queens of the Stone Age, Like Clockwork, is due for release in a few weeks. As a warm up, we asked readers via Twitter and Facebook which songs they'd recommend as an introduction to the band.

We used the responses to put together this playlist of 10 essential tracks. You can listen to all 10 as a YouTube playlist, or you can watch each individual video by clicking on the titles below. We've included a little bit of information on the songs, comments from the people who recommended them, and some links to our Queens of the Stone Age coverage from the last few years.

Now his band is on its sixth album, Bradford Cox gets to do what Bradford Cox wants – and we all have to get used to it, says Michael Hann. At this point, complaining about any of Bradford Cox's musical choices seems pointless: he does what he wants, and if you don't like it, you can go and listen to something else. You might as well suggest that oranges are all very well, but they'd be a whole lot better if they were peaches. Nevertheless, six albums intoDeerhunter's career, Bradford Cox's decision to embrace ultra-low fidelity seems perverse. Deerhunter's previous albums, Microcastle andHalcyon Digest, were – if not shiny, per se – bold and bright statements. Monomania, by contrast, sounds like it was recorded in a garden shed. Cox's voice is distorted and roughened throughout: it's paisley pop played through a garage rock-filter. It can be exciting: Leather Jacket II sounds permanently on the brink of falling apart, held together only by its lead guitar line; Dream Captain is disturbed bubblegum, the kind of song that used to crop up at the back end of albums by Kasenetz-Katzbands, after the singles. But it's hard not to yearn for the melodies to be served by a little more clarity.

The Ballad of Boogie Christ will be released on June 11 via Lonely Astronaut Records. Joseph Arthur has been cranking out critically acclaimed material for over a decade and a half, and now the singer-songwriter is back with a bold new venture. The Ballad of Boogie Christ is Arthur’s tenth studio album and represents an experimental new direction for the artist.

“Boogie Christ is unlike anything I’ve ever done before. It’s a big production with horns and soul singers; a psychedelic soul record about redemption and what happens after you find it and lose it,” said Arthur.

Their music predated the revolution that ousted President Hosni Mubarak, but the turmoil since has left Egypt’s huge youth population searching for voices that address issues they care about.    

TIME LINE

1963: PROTO-PUNK

Punk's progenitors were DIY garage rock bands – like The Kingsmen, whose "Louie Louie" was an early hint of the punk sound

1974: NEW YORK PUNK

The Ramones play first CBGB's gig. Television's Richard Hell pioneers spiky hair and safety-pinned clothes

1974: PUNK ON THE KING'S ROAD

Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood rename their boutique SEX – it is the shop that defines punk fashion

1975: JOHNNY ROTTEN

Regular SEX customer, the young John Lydon, is drafted in to front a McLaren-managed band – the Sex Pistols

1976: ANARCHY IN THE UK

The Sex Pistols play Manchester in June, The Clash debut in Sheffield in July and punk explodes across Britain . . .

It’s been five years, three albums, an SNL appearance, countless festival performances and one lawsuit from an unwitting album-cover model since Vampire Weekend dropped its self-titled debut, and still the class thing remains the predominant talking point about the band. Riding hard for the Upper West Side, the group turned its liberal arts degrees into American pop music that appropriated Afropop and songs that sent listeners to look up what the hell a mansard roof or an Oxford comma is. Of course, timing is everything, and if Vampire Weekend’s rise hadn’t coincided with the country’s severe financial faceplant, maybe their boat shoes and Columbia enrollment might not have been so big a deal. But when pensions and retirement plans were disappearing at a tragic rate, these four New Yorkers fronted like the very sons of the upper-class patriarchs who had so recently screwed the country over.

The singer has not yet revealed a name or an official release date for the LP, but Pitchfork writes that the album came "in the form of a burst of inspiration" when he finished up last year's sheet music Song Reader release. 

Beck will be playing a limited number of solo acoustic dates in North America this summer, where he will be debuting the new material, as well as some full band shows and a solo appearance on the Americanarama Festival bill in Wantagh, New York on July 27 alongside Bob Dylan and Wilco.

Speaking to NME late last year, Beck hinted that he would release two new albums in 2013.

"There is music and it's coming!" he said. 

"I have this one record I started in 2008. It got put to the side for a long time but recently I've been mixing some of the songs. I'm not sure if they'll be singles or EPs or an album but it'll come out in some way and it sounds... sonically adventurous. I also have a record that I recorded last year in Nashville, which I may or may not finish."

Beck's last full studio album 'Modern Guilt' was released in 2008.