While Palm Desert music has sometimes been termed “stoner rock,” there’s nothing dazed or blurry about Mr. Homme’s songwriting, which revolves around lean, exposed guitar riffs and sustained melodies. Even when the songs churn in odd meters, Mr. Homme gives them an architectural lucidity.

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The music on “... Like Clockwork” hones the way Queens of the Stone Age draw on the 1960s and 1970s with a flinty, contemporary sense of strategy. Songs start out with seemingly basic blues-rock, boogie or metal riffs, only to have the guitars (Mr. Homme, Dean Fertita and Troy Van Leeuwen) diverge to stake out separate tiers of lead, rhythm and scrabbling texture. In some songs, they also pile on together for some latter-day glam-rock or heave in and out of odd meters.

Yet they always open spaces for Mr. Homme’s long-breathed vocals. He’s a singer who never has to bark or scream, although he can. And on this album, in the title song and elsewhere, he also allows himself some unabashedly serious, barely accompanied ballad singing, as vulnerable as he has ever been.

In “I Appear Missing,” he sings:

Shock me awake, tear me apart

Pinned like a note in a hospital gown

A prison of sleep, deeper down

The rabbit hole never to be found.

The guitars, deployed high and low like the ones in the Beatles’ “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” pick a restrained riff, then switch to a bruising, crashing one, building volcanically with churchlike chimes’ pealing; it stops suddenly, startlingly, and then climbs further. The song is about a man at the border of life and death, with everything at stake, and that’s exactly how it sounds.