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This month, Intro was compiled by Chris Cope Jerry Ewing Cheri Faulkner Stephen Lambe Dom Lawson Dave Ling Rhodri Marsden Matt Mills Grant Moon Natasha Scharf

Top table: Omar Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala return with The Mars Volta.

PRESS/FAT BOB

THE MARS VOLTA GO ‘POP’ ON NEW ALBUM

After a decade away, the Texan mavericks return with their self-titled seventh album, which showcases a whole new approach. The music's leaner, but as sophisticated as ever.

The Mars Volta are back, 10 years after their last record, and their new material is billed as their most accessible yet.

Released on September 16 via Clouds Hill, the self-titled album sees guitarist Omar Rodríguez-López and singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala temper the more bombastic, proggy blow-outs that made their name, focusing instead on more concise songwriting and pop flourishes.

From their 2003 debut De-Loused In The Comatorium, The Mars Volta were at the vanguard of a new breed of hip bands making ambitious, expansive concept albums embracing meandering, psychedelic passages. They may be going more pop on this, their seventh album, but the Texas group aren’t forgetting their experimental roots. The new music is still ultimately progressive, drawing on the duo’s affection for albums such as Peter Gabriel’s 1986 bestseller, So.

This lineage is certainly borne out by the lead singles – the percussive, Caribbean-flavoured Blacklight Shine, catchy-yet-oblique synth piece Graveyard Love and Vigil, one of the band’s most mainstream moments to date.

A statement accompanying the release says that only two of the new songs last longer than four minutes, and that “The Mars Volta marks a profound shift in the group’s sound, a tectonic transference that might unsettle some.”

The idea of the band going pop has been in the pipeline for more than a decade, but the group’s lengthy hiatus in the 2010s put paid to the transformation. Their last record, Noctourniquet was released in 2012, with Rodríguez-López and Bixler-Zavala putting The Mars Volta on ice the year after. They then created new project Antemasque, and re-formed their posthardcore group, At The Drive In, between 2015 and 2018.

Lyrically, The Mars Volta is a more reined-in, direct affair, with fewer of the riddle-like statements of old. The songs are said to be “haunted by absent friends”, including the group’s late sound manipulator Jeremy Ward, who died aged just 27, shortly after the recording of De-Loused In The Comatorium.

“The most revolutionary thing for us to do was just be very simple and straightforward,” Bixler-Zavala says. “It’s therapy. And I’m lucky enough to have someone like Omar in my life, to spearhead that and make it all happen. His patience and tenacity are so key to all this. I’m constantly in awe of how he does shit.”

“The most revolutionary thing for us to do was just to be straightforward.”

The album also features bassist Eva Gardner, drummer Willy Rodriguez Quiñones and Omar’s brother Marcel Rodríguez-López on keyboards, but it’s the connection between Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodríguez-López that’s at the heart of it.

The vocalist was at first reluctant about the move towards more short-form music, but he was won over by the quality of the material coming his way. He says: “Everything I gravitated to what Omar gave me [for the record] had this ‘end-ofthe-movie, credits-are-rolling’ melancholy to it. I was moved to tears by much of it, because it mirrored, sonically and through chord changes, what I was feeling.”

Once he had demoed the music at home, Rodríguez-López flew to California to record his bandmate’s vocals, using a portable studio that apparently involved Bixler-Zavala’s head being ‘zipped inside a box’, to ensure appropriately intimate sound quality. Rodríguez-López then headed to New York to record the final versions of the tracks that make up The Mars Volta, alongside the pair’s hand-picked musical allies.

The band will head out on tour across the US and Canada after the album’s release. The run opens with a show in Dallas on September 22 and closes at the Hollywood Palladium, LA on October 23. As Prog went to press there was no news of any concert plans beyond those in North America.

For the full dates so far and all the latest information visit the band’s website at www.themarsvoltaofficial.com.

CC

A PROFUSION OF ANTIMATTERTUNES

Mick Moss on the dark proggers’ latest set of new/old music, due in November.

Thinking matter: Mick Moss.

PRESS

Merseyside dark prog outfit Antimatter will release their eighth studio album, A Profusion Of Thought, via Music In Stone in November. The record is a collection of 10 tracks that were written for previous releases but left unrecorded.