How The Mars Volta Built A Live LP With Its Fans

For most bands, a live album is a souvenir. For the Mars Volta, it’s an existential conundrum.

The El Paso, Tx.-born rock institution has spent more than two decades building a reputation on the idea that no performance should ever be the same twice. And, since 2004, guitarist, producer and de facto architect Omar Rodríguez-López has recorded every Mars Volta concert, accumulating an archive so vast that, as he puts it, “an abundance of material becomes a poverty of choice.” So when the group emerged from what Rodríguez-López describes as the most spiritually fulfilling tour of its 31-year history — a 2025 run supporting Deftones before launching its own headlining trek performing the then-unreleased Lucro Sucio; Los Ojos del Vacío — the question wasn’t whether to make a live album. It was how.

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The answer became Lucro Sucio; Unfinished Business, the band’s first official live release since 2005’s Scabdates, arriving digitally Sept. 4 ahead of an Oct. 16 physical release (click here to pre-order; sample lead track “Cue the Sun / Alba del Orate” here). Rather than compiling a single concert or constructing a traditional tour document, the Mars Volta invited fans directly into the creative process. Through an elaborate online platform unveiled after weeks of cryptic teasers and countdown clocks, listeners were given access to recordings from nearly every show on the 2025 tour and asked to vote not just on which performances should be included, but on specific moments within songs. The result is a crowd-sourced, fan-curated reconstruction of an album that itself was unveiled onstage before it ever existed in recorded form.

For Rodríguez-López, whose artistic worldview has always privileged experience over documentation, the experiment represented something deeper than a novel release strategy. In an exclusive interview with SPIN, he repeatedly returns to the notion of what he calls a “co-equal, co-eternal trinity” between performer, audience and creative spirit — a state of collective consciousness he believes the Mars Volta achieved night after night on last year’s tour. “The experience itself is the drug,” he says, attempting to describe the sense of transcendence the band felt. “And then the drug becomes the experience.”

Below, Rodríguez-López discusses the philosophical challenge of creating Lucro Sucio; Unfinished Business, why the band’s fans became essential collaborators in the process, how touring with Deftones reaffirmed his faith in music’s cyclical power and why, after three decades of defying expectations, the Mars Volta remains committed to the excitement of not knowing what happens next.

Why was it important for the band to memorialize the very unique performances you did on tour last year in the form of a live album?

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.

That’s very poetic, Omar. I don’t even know how to counter that, but I can feel your enthusiasm for the experience. Is part of what made you feel that way the fact that you were playing material which up to that point no one even knew existed, much less was going to come out as an album?

I think it’s actually very normal. What’s different is the industrialization of the individual and always making everyone aware of everything that you’re doing at every moment. Part of the culture of touring is, you played new material, and then the people took it in, and then you went and you recorded it and then the album came out. Then you went and played that material, and then you went and played new material. We liked being able to continue that, even in the face of a shifting landscape, and to have our own principles. Our own imagination about things. That’s definitely exciting. But the most exciting thing is this thing I’m trying to describe about the audience itself. We’re lucky enough to have cultivated an audience that’s in tune with us as people. This is an audience that’s looking for excitement and perspective, and that’s what I look for myself. I don’t know what book Ottessa Moshfegh is going to write next, but I know it’s gonna be exciting because it’s gonna be unexpected. We can only live life through our lens. If something’s exciting for us, it’ll be exciting to someone else. If you’re looking for stability, you wandered into the wrong meeting (laughs).

So again, it’s like this collective meditation or collective hallucination that happens in that trinity. It’s like witnessing a moment that corroborates collective consciousness without the use of psychedelics, right? The experience itself is the drug and then the drug becomes the experience. Night after night, we were having that level of an experience with our audience. That seems like a contradiction. This complete individuality — all the different people from different places and backgrounds, achieving symbiosis and becoming one being. That’s the opposite of collective uniformity, where you’re so overcome by self-consciousness and insecurity. It’s the absence of that and the presence of this thing that I’m trying to describe that could only be described as some strange kind of high. When the tour was over, we were like, I can’t believe that happened. Luckily, we have this document.

You opened up the track list and artwork selection process to your fans through a really unique interactive web site. What about this process has been most enriching?

The most exciting part is, again, the unknown. We’ve never done something like this before. We all were overcome with the overwhelming sense of gratitude and achievement with this tour, and now we’re enshrining this moment to them and having this record made by them. It goes back, actually, to 2005. We were wrapping up the Frances the Mute tour and we had a lot of pressure from the label to put out a live record. I went through all the material and it came down to three or four different cities, with Berlin being the clear frontrunner, hands down. Our manager at the time told me about an online community dedicated to cataloging and discussing our live shows. I had, and have, a hard rule not to ever go online or explore that world as to the outside view of us, but I did bend the rule a little. I asked our manager to go into the forum and see what the number one show was for the fans. Lo and behold, it was Berlin.

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. 

The Mars Volta is going back on the road this fall, and fans are quite curious if this might be a return to performing material from the back catalog or… something completely different?

We’ve done this live record and I think now you hit the part of the dynamic where you play some stuff from everywhere. I’m excited about it. This is, in our opinion, the definitive version of Lucro Sucio — the fans even voted on the album art. Now when they hear the real version of this record mixed in with all our other material, the hope is that it puts everything into context and this whole new thing happens. You achieve the next part of the dynamic, especially as you work on a set list and go, ahh, there it is, all within context — like scenes from a movie.

Deftones have found new generations of fans in the past several years and I’m curious if you guys picked up on that, being in arenas with them from night to night?

Definitely. It’s very palpable in their case. They finally jumped into arenas and it definitely speaks to the cyclical nature of self expression, music or whatever you want to call it — the fact that something can be rediscovered even when it’s been around for a while, or especially when it’s been around for a while. There’s a litany of artists that even in their time didn’t actually have a fan base, and years later, people go, oh, this is really good. And then there’s the example of people being reminded and going, oh yeah, we liked them, didn’t we? Let’s see what they’re up to. There’s an interconnectivity of everything now and new generations are able to discover things much faster, even though there is an over-saturation in general. But to your point, when the material is good, it rises to the top. So, it’s easier to discover things no matter what era it’s from. When you and I were growing up, most people — maybe not you, definitely not me — more than loving music, they loved genre. Then the iPod came around and changed everything. People are way more open now to hearing something they haven’t heard before or a sound they might not have even known that they would like and going, oh, I really like it, especially when it’s paired with an image.

So in the case of Deftones, it could be that, or a case of other people who got emotional resonance when the music was paired with some other image from right now. It’s like,  I was looking at this image from someone I’m following, but what is this music? Lo and behold, a whole new discovery is made, because the material supports it. It’s not arbitrary.

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