Metal Anarchy

The Mars Volta have announced a new live album titled “Lucro Sucio; Unfinished Business.” The effort features recordings that were voted on by fans and it will receive a digital release on September 4 and a physical release on October 16. It will be available in standard audio and Dolby Atmos formats. The first single, a live take on “Cue The Sun/Alba del Orate,” can be found below. Pre-orders can be found HERE.

“Lucro Sucio; Unfinished Business” Track Listing:

01. “Fin”
02. “Reina Tormenta / Enlazan Las Timeblas”
03. “Mictlan”
04. “The Iron Rose”
05. “Cue the Sun / Albe Del Orate”
06. “Voice in My Knives / Poseedora De Mi Sombra”
07. “Celaje”
08. “Vocifero”
09. “Mito De Los Trece Cielos”
10. “Un Disparo Al Vacio / Detras De La Puerta”
11. “Dorada”
12. “Maullidos”
13. “Morgana / Cue the Sun” (Reprise)
14. “Lucro Sucio”

Omar Rodríguez-López told Spin the following:

“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.”

He also added the following about the fan vote:

“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.”