Rock's most dangerous gang returns after 6 years with In Times New Roman, a brutally beautiful and highly complex 10-track collection packed with devastatingly delicious trap doors, richly lush production and musical blades sharpened in the friction of opposing forces.

Mithridatism is the practice of ingesting small amounts of poison with consistent frequency over a long period of time, with the eventual goal of building immunity. After the tribulations of the last several years in the world of Queens, such hard-won immunity is a fitting metaphor for the depth of potency and power of In Times New Roman.

In a stark departure from QOTSA's previous two albums, In Times New Roman has absolutely nothing to do with existential dilemmas or contemplative ambivalence. Vulnerability, uncertainty and longing have been traded out for a renewal of lava-in-the-veins certainty and purpose, the discovery that all these little sips of poison over the years have led, finally, to inoculation. 

Rock's most deadly goliaths have created a brilliantly brutal new fire, and just may have discovered immortality in the process.

Queens are back.

Knives out, bitches.

Foo Fighters have returned with "Rescued," the first single from their new album But Here We Are, out June 2 on Roswell Records/RCA Records. The only problem? The song is not very good, and there's something significant missing.

We also dive into the Sonic Temple festival happening May 25-28 in Ohio, as well as the return of Queens of the Stone Age and more. And while not a single publication ran with the (highly exciting) Soundgarden lawsuit + new album story for 11 days after we broke the news in ep. 66, it has now been confirmed by the band. For future would-be naysayers to prevent more embarrassment, in this episode we provide a little verifying backstory on Antiquiet - as well as a Johnny Firecloud career highlight reel.

Antiquiet Exclusive: A long-running lawsuit between Soundgarden and Vicky Cornell over the use of her late husband Chris Cornell's unreleased vocal tracks has been settled. This means the nearly-completed new Soundgarden album can now be finished and released, an enormously exciting development for fans.

Full details in the episode!

The as-yet-untitled album's song titles likely include:

“Road Less Traveled” (Cornell/Cameron) 
“Orphans” (Cornell/Cameron)
“At Ophians Door” (Cornell/Cameron) 
“Cancer” (Cornell) 
“Ahead Of The Dog” (Cornell/Thayil) 
“Merrmas” (Cornell/Shepherd)  
“Stone Age Mind” (Cornell)

When two German festivals kicked the 2023 version of Pantera off their summer lineups last week, due to frontman Phil Anselmo screaming "white power" repeatedly onstage and throwing Sieg Heil nazi victory salutes, there was a deafening reactionary silence from some of the most influential rock publications in America.

The drastic rise of white supremacy and nazi ideology in our country has become a severe crisis of sociopolitical danger, but a conversation has yet to take place about how to effectively fight back. The left sees it and attempts to address it, but is so obsessed with never stepping on anyone's toes that they've paralyzed any impactful dialogue about solutions to the point of parody, while the right is gleefully stomping through the same room with anvil boots and calling it freedom and patriotism.

When that genocidal hatred is screamed and supported onstage by an American hard rock icon like Anselmo, never before in modern history has there been a more urgent moment for music journalists to address this problem directly - to use their privilege and platform for responsible editorialization and kick off important conversations, rather than the usual inconsequential gladhanding shit-shining access journalism we've come to know as the standard.

Instead, we're hearing a chorus of crickets - particularly from Revolver Magazine, the leading hard rock music publication in America, whose breathlessly fawning coverage of Anselmo over the years has given Anselmo's racist, genocide-promoting bully antics a new era of exposure, popularity and profit.

I say fuck that noise. 

If now isn't the time to start a conversation about hateful ideologies poisoning the things we hold dear, then when? It is quite literally a matter of now or never.

The Taylor Hawkins tribute concert on Sept 27th at the Forum in Los Angeles was a massive, jaw-droppingly star-studded event to honor the fallen Foo Fighters drummer.  Taylor's seat and beats were filled by a rotating cast of drummers including Travis Barker, Stewart Copeland, Danny Carey, Chad Smith, Lars Ulrich, Jon Theodore and more, including a tearjerker Foo Fighters performance with T's 16 year old son Shane Hawkins.

With performances from Josh Homme, Pink, Brian May, members of Soundgarden with Taylor Momsen, half of Mötley Crüe, the return of Foo Fighters and even Dave Chappelle singing Radiohead, missing this night was not  an option. And that's before the lava-in-your-veins icing: Them Crooked Vultures taking flight after more than a decade.

Here's the highlight reel from a once-in-a-lifetime night.

The Antiquiet Podcast is back. Thanks for listening.

Here's what happens when you take an 8-gram hero dose of psilocybin mushrooms to listen to Tool's 'Lateralus' album for the first time, completely alone. 
Spoiler alert: things very much did not go as planned.

20 years ago, on May 15, 2001, Tool's maniacally-anticipated 'Lateralus' was released. The hype for this record is hard to put into perspective in today’s terms. You’d have to pull out all our favorite blossoms of cultural stimuli by the roots to really understand the context - remove the distractions of social media, iPhones, the proliferation of our online existences in the endless + massively distracting glut of "content" and hyperbole that it's become. Remove all of that, and you're left with the dirt-road beginnings of the internet as it was in 2001. News wasnt old 20 minutes after it broke. The "all your base are belong to us" meme, one of the first from the internet’s initial wave of weird humor, had arrived literally three months prior and was still going strong. Long-tail anticipation was still a feature of our collective culture, which hadn't yet splintered into a Plinko-game tsunami of subcultures and niches.

The goal was to trip significantly while being soundtracked by a group of musicians whose entire existence within this project was dedicated to providing tools by which to dig deeper, explore the unknown, confront the discomforting. I would emerge, hopefully, with a little better of an understanding of my own life - or at least the connecting threads between my immediate circumstances and the many choices I make in life to get me there. Life doesnt just happen, and mushrooms have a distinct way of showing you the blossoms of consequence - good or bad - and fractals of expanding reaction to your choices, which fills your experience as a person and comprises what you call… life.

I was completely unprepared for what I'd signed up for. I’d never heard of a “hero dose," let alone the relatively horrifying implications it carried. But it's typically understood to be about 5 grams. And my stupid, lonesome self was on my way to an 8-gram ride. Needless to say, the arrogance and ignorance required for such an adventure were exterminated with extreme prejudice during my trip. Also covered: microdosing, the Bavarian Beer Act of 1516, the Fantastic Fungi documentary, mycologist Paul Stamets, the glory days of Toolshed.down.net, Stoned Ape theory and more...

Stories, songs, observations and other weird wanderings about a band whose music has soundtracked every shifting frequency of my own life. Here is part one of a two-episode run on the path of Pearl Jam fandom, from teenage obsession through seasoned adoration.

This is one PJ fan's blueprint to falling in love. Discovering musical passion. Catching a tambourine. Finding my heartsong. Traveling thousands of miles for shows, many times over, for three hours of heart-soaring release, catharsis and rejuvenation. For almost three decades I’ve looked to Pearl Jam's music as a life barometer, a horizon line by which to fix my eyes and set my course over the high seas of life.

This is part one of the story of that path.