Eclectic prog rockers The Mars Volta have officially announced their upcoming new live album, “Lucro Sucio; Unfinished Business“. The outfit let their fans vote democratically, if not a bit cryptically, on the performances that will make that release, having launched a series of mysterious teases with fan-voting enabled. As the title suggests, this new album will hone in on performances of their latest album, “Lucro Sucio; Los Ojos del Vacio“. Those featured recordings were captured amid the band’s 2025 touring, much of which saw them performing that record in its entirety nightly.
Titled “Lucro Sucio; Unfinished Business“, this new live offering will be out digitally on September 04th, with a physical release planned for October 16th. Notably, it’s also been mentioned that the album was not only mixed in a standard audio formats, but also in Dolby Atmos as well. In a newly published interview with Spin, the band’s multi-instrumentalist Omar Rodríguez-López spoke of the band’s desire to document that record, stating:
“I guess a good place to start is for the context of it. The creation of a live album can be particularly difficult for a project like ours, where the performances or the expressions change a lot from night to night. It becomes a matter of emotional states and feelings, and they don’t oscillate from listen to listen. It becomes an issue of practicality when there’s too much information. I’ve recorded every show since 2004, so I’ve come to realize an abundance of material becomes a poverty of choice. All this is rooted in the fact that the project itself was conceived primarily as a live entity. The shifting, changing elements and extreme variation is a foundational principle baked into the DNA.
Our mantra has always been prioritizing the concern and care of real life — what we’re actually experiencing and protecting at all costs. In contrast, the albums are highly stylized, meticulously performed and edited. Those serve the function of a documentation or a staged picture of the actual life as it was lived. But then that takes us to the live experience, which is a completely unique thing. This whole last year of 2025 started with Defones and then it went into our own tour, performing Lucro Sucio. Maybe this is subjective, but this was unquestionably our favorite tour in 31 years of touring — no competition. We came away from it feeling this level of spiritual and emotional fulfillment that’s really hard to reach and completely impossible to manufacture. The feeling from technicians to the touring party was that it was a magical experience. I had never experienced this before.
When that happens, everything becomes very, very clear. It starts to transcend rational or intellectual analysis of a repeat performance to produce what can only be described as a perfect show. Meaning, connecting deeply with the audience to the point of a congenial fracture of time and space. I hate to use the word perfect, but that’s how I feel. It’s this rare dynamic — this co-equal, co-eternal trinity between the creative spirit, the performers and the audience becoming one thing in one moment in space. That’s the best way I could describe it.”
As for directly involving the fans in helping not only selecting the featured performances, but also the artwork for the release, Omar went on to say:
“The initial idea for this album was that I was going to ask our current management to relay me what fans thought the top three shows were on the tour of Lucro Sucio, and I’ll cut between them to make a live album. But what happened was that I was on my weekly call with my very close friend and business partner, and I was telling him about this. He’s one of those empathetic, tuned in, highly proficient, perceptive prototypes of a new human, and he came up with this really wonderful idea: why don’t we break it down even further and actually have the fans vote on moments throughout the performance of all 25 nights?
It’s with the exception of Philadelphia, because that one was just lost to the recording gods. This truly gets to the matter of creating an album in direct collaboration with the fans, where I’d cut all these pieces together and make them flow into one performance that embodies the spirit of everything. My friend and his brother actually created the web site to house the material. My engineers and I were turning these around as quickly as possible, bootleg-style — five MP3 references that wouldn’t slow down the site.
As the voting came in, we were cutting together the performances and the flow, then handing them off to Robert Carranza, who was mixing everything that day in stereo and Atmos. It has been a lot of complicated and challenging work, but I love this lightning speed thing. It’s not so much about losing some things in exchange for others. It’s not so much about the level of precision and control that I’m used to in making an album.
The projects that challenge you take you to a new place of skill and understanding, so they’re the most fulfilling. This is all thanks to the fans, because I don’t think I could even decide [the track list] anyways because of my own emotional attachment to what I was trying to describe with the actual experience. To me, this is the perfect collaboration between us and our fans. I hope they enjoyed it as much as I did.”
Your first taste of the finished product has arrived online in the form of the below stream of “Cue The Sun/Alba del Orate“. Pre-orders for the record have been launched via themarsvolta.com, with the track listing mirroring the album’s original running order.
