The Mars Volta announce acoustic ‘self-titled’ album, share reworked ‘Blank Condolences’
The Mars Volta have announced details of an acoustic reworking of their ‘self-titled’ 2022 comeback album – check out the stripped down ‘Blank Condolences’ below.
The Texas-formed band released six studio albums between 2003 and 2012 before splitting due to a falling-out between founding members Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodríguez-López. In the years that followed, the pair formed new group Antemasque and resurrected their pre-Mars Volta outfit At-the-Drive-In for a new record in 2017.
They reunited last year to release ‘The Mars Volta’ ahead of a US headline tour.
The legendary prog band have now announced new record ‘Que Dios Te Maldiga Mi Corazon’, an acoustic reworking of that comeback album. They’ve also shared the first taste from the reimagined record – check out ‘Blank Condolences (acoustic)’ below.
The “folk record” was spearheaded by Rodríguez-López almost immediately after work had finished on ‘The Mars Volta’.
“It was a fun process,” he said in a press release. “And it made me think about the history of record music in the United States. There was ‘traditional music’, which became ‘Americana’, or country music. And the other genre was ‘race music’, which was exactly what it sounds like: music made by anyone who was an ‘immigrant’, mostly meaning black people. So that means everything that wasn’t ‘country’. In other words, all the interesting shit: r&b, blues, rock’n’roll, electronic music… It says a lot about this country.”
‘Que Dios Te Maldiga Mi Corazon’ is The Mars Volta’s version of “traditional music”, seen through the lens of the band’s own heritage.
“I realised I could finally make a record like this now, I just had to make it happen,” said Rodríguez-López. “That was the experiment. And it was super-fun. I feel like The Mars Volta is finally beginning – that’s why the last album was self- titled, because we’ve finally stripped everything away and arrived at what the whole concept was at the beginning. And this acoustic version comes from a profound place, with its own meaning and philosophy, and its own reason for being.”
‘Que Dios Te Maldiga Mi Corazon’ is due for release April 21.
Speaking to NME last year, Bixler-Zavala said: “I think it’s cool if you can’t put us into any one particular place. If we continue that in 2023, that’s really nice because it means we get to play with a lot of different types of artists. We don’t consider ourselves this or that or the other. We just consider ourselves The Mars Volta.”
Ahead of a stint supporting the Red Hot Chili Peppers on their upcoming stadium tour, The Mars Volta will return to the UK in June. Tickets are available here.
The Mars Volta will play:
JUNE
16 – Barrowland Ballroom, Glasgow
17 – O2 Apollo, Manchester
18 – Troxy, London
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Ali Shutler
NME
