A journey for the resurrection of peace, love, and Death Metal

For the first seventeen years of their existence, Eagles of Death Metal were perpetually miscast. They should have seen that coming—as a garage rock band that relies heavily on tongue-in-cheek, exaggerated seventies rock stereotypes, their sound bears only minimal resemblance to the Eagles or to death metal. With their first album coming less than a year and a half after drummer Josh Homme reached mainstream success with his band Queens of the Stone Age, Eagles of Death Metal were inevitably labeled as a “side project” for Homme—the band’s true leader was always singer/guitarist Jesse Hughes, whose idiosyncratic mix of Canned Heat-inspired vocals, rockabilly guitar influences, and love of campy rock and roll conventions made him a compelling counterpoint to Homme, a tall, muscular, handsome stage presence. Homme as a frontman was functionally arena rock—Hughes as frontman was an oddball. It was this combination that has made Eagles of Death Metal a consistently exciting band. It also made them perhaps uniquely unqualified for the role that tragic circumstances thrust upon them.

Eagles of Death Metal have had moderate popular success—a few appearances in commercials and on soundtracks and a top 40 hit on the U.S. Alternative Charts in “Wannabe in L.A.” But the entire tone surrounding the band permanently changed on November 13, 2015, when the band’s headlining performance at Paris’s Bataclan theater was attacked by ISIL terrorists. The band members survived without injury; 90 others, including their merchandise manager, were killed. Suddenly, one of the least serious bands in the world, a band arguably most famous for their inside joke of a name, became a rallying cry.

The band was understandably shaken by the events—while Jesse Hughes defiantly declared less than two weeks later than he wanted EODM “to be the first band that plays the Bataclan when it opens back up”, this came during an interview during which the touring members and Homme (who was absent during the Paris attacks and only sporadically performs live with the band) openly and unabashedly wept. But it suddenly became imperative among the rock community that this band survive. Many artists covered the band’s part-French “I Love You All the Time”, with proceeds from sales going to victims of the attack. A campaign began to get their cover of Duran Duran’s “Save a Prayer” to #1 on the UK singles chart—while it fell short, the cover became the band’s biggest hit, and Duran Duran, who had performed the song live with EODM prior to the attacks, agreed to donate their royalties to charity. A band for whom a show at a 1,500 seat theater was typical was playing alongside U2 at a 17,000+ seat arena in Paris less than a month after the attacks.

In the wake of the Paris attacks, the music world wanted to rally around Eagles of Death Metal and they wanted the kind of reassuring stadium rock U2 provided. Both were still independently possible, but people wanted the two in one package. But U2 is the band that made “Where the Streets Have No Name” and “One”, while Eagles of Death Metal is the band who were touring an album titled Zipper Down whose cover featured a woman whose otherwise-exposed breasts were covered by pictures of the band’s two principal members.

Normally, there is plenty of room in the world of rock and roll for both of these types of bands. Post-Bataclan, there was demand for one. A dark but impossible to deny fact is that Eagles of Death Metal never had, and likely never will, generate more publicity than they did on what was at the same time the worst moment in the band’s history. Having a member who two years prior to the attacks fronted a band with the #1 album in the United States wasn’t enough to give EODM headlines. The number of people who researched the band upon hearing “I Only Want You” in Windows 8 advertisements or “Now I’m a Fool” after seeing Silver Linings Playbook paled in comparison to the number of people who heard about “this band that doesn’t actually sound like the Eagles nor death metal” through news coverage of a story much larger than the band itself.

Eagles of Death Metal began 2016 with a relaunch of their delayed European tour, now renamed the Nos Amis (“Our Friends”, in English) Tour. The band returned to Paris in February and the subsequent tour became the subject of an HBO documentary directed by Colin Hanks which was released in February 2017. But within a month of EODM’s by all accounts triumphant return to face-melting garage rock in Paris, the era of good feelings ended for the band.

Jesse Hughes had been open about his political leanings—conventionally conservative in some ways but in many ways guided by reactionary emotion—before Bataclan. As somebody who disagrees with Hughes on virtually every political issue on which he has ever espoused an opinion, this never bothered me much, largely because Eagles of Death Metal is almost aggressively not a political band. Like the bands from which they drew inspiration—mid-period Rolling Stones, early-period Aerosmith, every-period-until-the-day-they-die AC/DC—EODM wrote and performed songs about sex, drugs, rock and roll, and virtually nothing else. Some have likened Hughes to a young generation’s Ted Nugent, but unlike Nugent, Hughes hasn’t been known to get on his political soapbox during concerts. This certainly wasn’t a Rage Against the Machine situation, where a conservative politician like Paul Ryan being a fan of a band with such far left lyrical content seems contradictory. Artist and art are easily separated in this case.

But Hughes’s comments post-Bataclan ventured from potentially divisive to downright disturbing. His initial claim, which as it turned out was merely him dipping his toes into controversial waters, was that gun control had enabled the Bataclan attack and that had French citizens been permitted to bear arms, the attack could have been stopped. He then turned up the heat by claiming, without substantiation or any subsequent evidence that he or anyone else has presented, that he saw Muslims celebrating in the streets of Paris the night of the attack. In another interview, Hughes alleged that the attack was an inside job, claiming that security personnel who did not show up that night were aware of what was coming. Suddenly, Eagles of Death Metal went from unreservedly sympathetic victims to dangerous provocateurs—in light of the comments, the band was dropped from multiple French music festivals.

The comments forced me and other fans of Eagles of Death Metal to re-examine our feelings about the band. On one hand, what Jesse Hughes claimed was deeply irresponsible, throwing red meat at those looking to justify, if not weaponize, bigotry and hatred. On the other hand, why would I expect a guy with whom the entire extent of our relationship is “he makes some cool guitar riffs I like” to have particularly refined takes, especially given that he was being asked about hot-button issues as they related directly to the most traumatic night of his life? This wasn’t, I concluded, analogous to condemning R. Kelly, a problematic artist who 1. Is problematic through actions rather than words; 2. Has lyrical content that can be easily viewed differently given more context about his personal life; 3. Has absolutely no excuses for his behavior that hold a candle to “I saw 90 people die at an event that only occurred because of me”.

In the end, I simply began to view Hughes differently. In the first decade or so of Eagles of Death Metal, I viewed him as not dissimilar to how I viewed myself: a high school loner trying to channel his weirdness into a quirky package that could reach others of a similar persuasion. Following his comments, I began to view Hughes like an uncle who spends all day posting memes on Facebook about how liberals want to ban churches and replace them with shrines to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I find the message annoying on a good day and despicable on an average one, but I’m also rooting for him to see the light. I’ve seen his potential and I don’t want to see the brain worms of a historically stupid era of evidence-less conspiracy theories-as-serious discourse corrupt him.

In 2017, Eagles of Death Metal recorded their first post-Bataclan songs in-studio, kind of. The band contributed to two above-average pop-rock tracks on Kesha’s acclaimed comeback album Rainbow, “Let ‘Em Talk” and “Boogie Feet”. The end result, particularly in the case of the latter, sounded essentially like The Ting Tings, which was a positive enough outcome, but neither song was written by Hughes nor Josh Homme and arguably reflected Kesha’s take on what a collaboration with Eagles of Death Metal should sound like rather than anything the band itself would have in mind.

But in 2019, the band returned with its first semi-proper album since 2015 with a left-field collection of covers, EODM Presents Boots Electric Performing The Best Songs We Never Wrote. It is simultaneously the most Jesse Hughes-heavy album (“Boots Electric” is Hughes’s musical pseudonym) and the least promoted album—the collection was initially a limited release and received so little attention that it doesn’t even so much as have a Wikipedia page. And yet it became the album in 2019 that I most wanted to be good. The album, described by Hughes as therapeutic to record following a bout with depression following the Paris tragedy, was significant in its very existence and as a battle of sorts for the soul of Eagles of Death Metal. Were they the same, silly rock band of yesteryear or had the shooting cost the band its soul?

The album is clunky both in title and in its oddball mixture of songs. The first three tracks are, on their surface, an expected trio for a hard rock band’s covers album—KISS’s “God of Thunder”, Guns N’ Roses’ “It’s So Easy”, and the AC/DC double-punch “High Voltage/It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock’n’Roll)”. While the first cover is relatively straightforward, the next track, a cover of the second track off Appetite for Destruction, sounds like Richard Cheese impersonating B-52s impersonating GNR, with Hughes and female backing vocalists goofing their way through it all the way. The AC/DC medley combines sincerity with camp, with the songs being musically similar to the originals but with Hughes’s casual vocals highlighting the absurdity of AC/DC’s cartoonish machismo.

And then the album starts to venture a bit off the rails. “So Alive” becomes a glam anthem, after which they attempt a slowed-down rendition of the Ramones’ “Beat on the Brat”. Next comes a trio of massive pop hits—Steve Miller Band’s “Abracadabra”, George Michael’s “Careless Whisper”, and Mary J. Blige’s “Family Affair”. Perhaps most surprising is how relatively faithful to the original these are, aside from the pronounced female backing vocals in “Abracadabra” and the crunching guitar in place of saxophone in “Careless Whisper”. Meanwhile, while a cover of Mary J. Blige from a rock band may sound unusual, it is arguably the most straightforward cover on the album—Hughes even retains the “let’s get crunk ‘cause Mary’s back” lyric. Normally, I oppose covers this conventional on studio recordings because why not just listen to the original, but the shock value of this band doing this song is too jarring to resist.

And given the conclusions that one could extrapolate about Hughes as a regressive figure, there’s something refreshing about him covering an openly gay artist in Michael and a black female artist in Blige, both of whom he has cited in interviews as among his favorite artists. It is a refreshing reminder in a more general sense that most great musicians have wide and varied musical influences. While plenty of fans of EODM’s brand of straightforward rock can be dismissive of pop and R&B, the artists themselves tend to, at the minimum, respect the greats of the genres. And George Michael and Mary J. Blige qualify.

Admittedly, the album starts to lose some steam on the back half. With the exception of a cover of David Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream” that sounds like it came out of the 1930s, there’s nothing especially memorable. But on the whole, this is a solid album. And most importantly, it is a redemptive album of sorts.

Not that he’s tried particularly hard to do so, but even if he did, Jesse Hughes is never going to escape his post-Bataclan comments. One might be tempted to criticize him for trying to go on about his life as though nothing happened, but by recording an album that fits squarely within the pre-Paris EODM ethos, he’s ignoring the attacks themselves, which he is allowed and arguably right to do, in addition to the backlash. This isn’t the greatest Eagles of Death Metal album—in fact, it’s arguably my least favorite. It’s a solid album, though it would be a real stretch to call it the best album of 2019. But it is also, beyond its musical value, pure catharsis. In a way that transcends its actual quality, it is probably my favorite album of the year.

Some, particularly non-fans, may have hoped EODM would emerge with a reflection on their horrifying experiences and some newfound sense of maturity, but this wouldn’t have been true to the band’s personality. This isn’t a band merely content with making big dumb rock—it is a band which revels in it. They aren’t U2. They aren’t trying to be.

On the day of the Paris attacks, Eagles of Death Metal’s most played song on Spotify was “Miss Alissa”, a non-single fan favorite off the band’s only proper album to not chart in the United States. This perfectly conveyed the band’s status as a band that existed for the purpose of those who liked them and wasn’t trying to be everything to everybody. Today, nearly four years later, their most played song on Spotify is still “Miss Alissa”. As with the band itself, sometimes it’s comforting to know that some things never change.