The Mars Volta Announce First Album in a Decade, Share New Song

It’s official: The Mars Volta have announced their first new album in a decade. The self-titled LP is due September 16. The Mars Volta are also releasing a new song called “Vigil” today to celebrate the news. Check it out below.

The Mars Volta is 14 tracks long and includes the previously released singles “Blacklight Shine” and “Graveyard Love.” Like those two songs, “Vigil” is a brisk number that’s far away from their prog-rock heyday, clocking in around three minutes. A press release states that the new album has only two tracks that are longer than four minutes and that the new record finds guitarist Omar Rodríguez-López and singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala at “their most mature, most concise, most focused.”

Next month, the Mars Volta will hit the road for a North American tour. It starts in Dallas i late September, and finds the band stopping in Atlanta, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Toronto, Chicago, Seattle, and other major cities before concluding the tour in Los Angeles in late October.

The most recent album by the Mars Volta, Noctourniquet, came out in 2012. The band broke up the following year. In 2021, the Mars Volta released a massive 18-LP box set titled La Realidad de los Sueños. The deluxe release included the group’s entire studio discography in addition to Landscape Tantrums (unreleased material from the De-Loused in the Comatorium sessions) and a photo book with behind-the-scenes images.

Bixler-Zavala hinted at the band’s return back in 2019, saying, “It’s NOT going to be is your ‘fav member lineup’ playing their ‘classic records’ in full etc. Maybe we’ll play old shit, who knows how we feel.” He continued: “No deadlines, no ball tripping, no drama, just 2 grown ass men using essential oils and bold new perfumes shooting ideas and scooting their ass across the fucking lawn trying to get rid of these worms.”