Even if they hadn’t released a note this year, Queens of the Stone Age’s influence on 2007 was confirmed the moment Arctic Monkeys attributed their new heaviness to them. It says a lot about Josh Homme’s influence that the most alpha of young British bands looked to him when thinking of ways not to be whatever people said they were.

It says a lot, and yet it’s somehow not surprising. At times it seems that since forming QOTSA from the ashes of grunge also-rans Kyuss, Homme has never encountered another musician who didn’t become a close personal friend.

Dave Grohl delayed a Foo Fighters album just so he could drum in QOTSA. Mark Lanegan came in 2001 and left in 2006. Various alt-luminaries Homme hasn’t yet crow-barred into QOTSA – Polly Harvey, Dean Ween, a few Nine Inch Nails alumni – have been redirected into another project, the Desert Sessions, in which Homme’s hommes jam new tunes into existence.

It was one such tune you will have heard four years back if you saw Harvey consorting with an ensemble of unfamiliar men live on Later. So good, in fact, was the reptilian sex-rock of Make It Wit Chu that it resurfaces halfway through Era Vulgaris, with Homme approximating a falsetto Mick Jagger in lieu of Harvey’s cameo. Before that point, QOTSA sound like a band that needs to be reminded of Homme’s famous mission statement for them: to make music “sweet enough for the chicks and heavy enough for the dudes”.

For sweetness, read melody. Try to remember anything of the new single Sick, Sick, Sick and what remains is the damp, airless, production and a guitar that sounds like a mis-firing lawnmower. Inasmuch as it sounds like a passable chorus struggling to escape a Pavement B-side, I’m Designer is marginally better. But by floating the notion of a metal George Harrison playing over a four-to-the-floor avalanche, only Into the Hollow rescues the first half of the album from stoner-rock torpor.

Still, if ever a record was sequenced to dignify the football commentator’s cliché about there being everything to play for at half-time, here it is. Indeed, you could insert a rollocking from Brian Clough between the dreadful Battery Acid and the sublime Make it Wit Chu and the effect couldn’t be more pronounced.

Hereafter, Era Vulgaris is a transformed album. Homme navigates the rattling, rain-lashed Suture up your Future like a horny spectre, before a single repeated chord ushers in the military spook-rock of River in the Road.

But best of the run is the title track itself, a performance that compellingly main-lines the curdled reality of Nirvana’s In Utero. Better late than never, of course – but for anyone seeking a return to the propulsive foreboding of Lullabies to Paralyse (2005), this sudden reawakening of classic QOTSA might come too late to rescue what is best seen as a great EP with a long, dull preamble.

(Interscope )

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