For one album - Songs for the Deaf - the Queens of the Stone Age had ex-Nirvana drummer Dave Growl as their drummer. The result, I think, can be seen one of two ways: Either the band fully utilized the opportunity of the legendary drummer's services to push their songwriting to the stratosphere. Or the legendary drummer utilized the opportunity of recording with this talented group to force their songwriting into the stratosphere, by pure will of his relentlessly excellent drumming.
I will keep saying this, often with songs involving Dave Grohl: Drum creativity is song creativity!
The verse riff is great. About every drummer would either over or underplay it. Not only does Dave Grohl hit the right intensity and sharpness, but he creatively puts the snare on the down beat with the rat-a-tat kick drum on the back beat, inverting the usual order. When the song starts in with drums and bass only, the song is already in hyperspace. The guitars entering open a wormhole.
The chorus is another savage percussive creation of Grohl's combined with guitar work that exemplifies a principle of heaviness I haven't yet discussed: Doubled guitars, medium gain, small-interval chords. A single guitar cannot achieve the effect. Multiple unison guitars thicken the sound, creating density. Using small-interval chords compounds the density. Lowering the gain allows us to hear the colliding notes rather than obscuring them in noise. Bonus: Avoid hitting higher strings, further compacting the sound spectrum. With the right ingenious heavy drummer playing for you, the final effect is a headbanging sludgefest.
This is the low-fi heavy sound of Queens of the Stone Age par excellence.
The vocal is in a pretty vibrato typical of Josh Homme. Such smart, simple melodies with three-syllable lines, something that make this band the true inheritor of the grunge legacy in my mind. Homme's gift for uniting inventive melody and heaviness does proud the likes of Nirvana, the Melvins, and Mudhoney. At least I think he did for one fantastic album with Dave Growl drumming, urging the music to hunger for more and more.