El Paso, TX · prog-rock

The Mars Volta

1 upcoming festival

At the Drive-In's cosmic successors — salsa-prog freakouts and falsetto fire, 'The Widow' amid the labyrinth.

The Mars Volta grew out of the breakup of At the Drive-In, with guitarist and composer Omar Rodríguez-López and singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala continuing together as a duo at the centre of a shifting cast of players. Their debut album, De-Loused in the Comatorium, appeared in 2003, followed by Frances the Mute, Amputechture, The Bedlam in Goliath, Octahedron and Noctourniquet.

The music pulls progressive rock structures through Latin percussion, dub-influenced production, free-jazz blowing and long passages of noise and abstraction, with Bixler-Zavala's high, elastic vocals carrying dense narrative lyrics. The band went quiet in 2013 before returning in 2022 with a self-titled album that traded much of the sprawl for shorter, more song-shaped material.

prog-rock