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Song Recommendation: “The Iron Rose” by The Mars Volta (2025)

I’ve been listening to Lucro Sucio; Los ojos del vacio, the new record from indie-rock iconoclasts The Mars Volta, since even before it came out (I’m not not admitting to jumping on the leak bandwagon). I mean, that was apparently part of the rollout plan as the band decided to play the album in full during their opening tour slot for Deftones at the start of the year (prior to even announcing the record in the first place). Then that aforementioned leak. And that story about the food delivery driver getting a burned CD from lead singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala himself. With no singles and very little in the way of marketing otherwise, it was like they wanted a combination of secrecy and word of mouth and you’d be forgiven for having overlooked it, but I think it’s not only top-tier Mars Volta but one of the best records of the year. It works as such a complete statement and its subdued–yet fiery–mood is as unforgettable as it is unstoppable. 


I’m more than likely going to dig into the album as a whole later this year (and beyond) so while I certainly think you should listen to the whole thing front to back, if you just need a little bit of a taste, please start with “The Iron Rose.” If the last time you checked in on The Mars Volta was in the Goliath days or even back when they were worried about delayed exoskeletal railroad junctions, then “The Iron Rose,” might come as a bit of a shock. Absent are the hot-blooded spiraling guitar riffs, the lyrics are (mostly) decipherable and even straightforwardly earnest, the drums are groovy and deployed almost melodically, emphasizing the depth of feeling of the vocal delivery and not creating a sonic whirlwind over which Bixler-Zavala’s has been howling since the Drive-In days. It has a verse-chorus-verse- format and doesn't collapse and rebuild itself but rather pulls the listener closer and closer as it carefully layers each of its emerging musical elements (just listen how they fold in that  incredible bass riff in the final set of choruses). It doesn’t even drift into ambient soup for more than a few bars (even using that brief pause towards the end to nod at the fact that it borrows from that ur-”drums as dramatic melody” thing that Phil Collins did indeed perfect with “In the Air Tonight”). And it’s all under 4 minutes?!?!


And yet. It’s still a Mars Volta track through and through and while their overall sound has softened from their early days, the visceral intensity and penchant for wild experimentation still shines through brightly. “The Iron Rose” presents an early emotional anchor in the journey of the album overall. The aforementioned drums, combined with the floating synths and the beautifully harmonized vocals somehow miraculously create a kind of 80’s indie-rock earworm but the underlying instability of the whole thing and the way it only gradually dawns on the listener undercuts that inherent sweetness. (That instability, by the way, is really felt when listening to the full record, this track is actually preceded by two and a half minutes of preamble ambient soup that I was just telling you this song lacked). 


In the limited prerelease materials, this song was originally titled “Nefelibata” which apparently is an archaic Portuguese word that roughly correlates to “daydreamer.” I’ve been pondering the name change since the official release and what, if anything, the image of an iron rose conveys that’s analogous. Then again. Maybe it’s just one more mystery that The Mars Volta are compelled to leave in the wake of their incredible artistic creations. 


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Album Recommendation: The Bedlam in Goliath by The Mars Volta (2008)

Do I dare call this a retro review? I can’t help but smile at the alliteration (we love a good alliteration) and yet also be saddened by the inexorable passage of time. I remember working at Zia Record Exchange when this came out, so how old can it possibly be?

Oh.

Well, regardless, I’m on record with complex (and ever-evolving) thoughts on The Mars Volta’s body of work—having once written: “something about the need to embrace the most obtuse directions for a lot of their music kept a lot of it from being something I’d choose to seek out. And while I liked De-Loused and Frances the Mute, it was frustrating to constantly have them swerve left when I had the gut feeling that, you know, a right turn might be okay too.” 

Even so, every couple of years I’d try to go through their back catalog and see if anything clicked. And early this year, I put on The Bedlam in Goliath on a whim. After all, 2022’s self-titled record from The Mars Volta had made it into my top albums of that year, so it was probably time to revisit the records I’d bounced off of in the past.

And, reader, this time something clicked. Opener “Aberinkula” doesn’t so much start as it explodes like the big bang: frighteningly hot and spiraling out in every direction at near the speed of light. Sure, it sounds like a wall of noise, and I think that wall had just been too high for me to scale in the past. But something about that early day in January had me primed to get my head over that wall and fall into the cacophonous, terrifying whirlpool that is The Bedlam in Goliath. Yes, as a whole, it’s pretty long and can be an exhausting listen, but I think that only adds to the overwhelming nature of it all. There is some sort of narrative going on—something about a cursed Ouija board (and apparently the creation of this album, in and of itself, was an incredibly fraught experience)—but all that really melts away in the unrelenting forward motion as bandleaders Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodríguez-López capture ball lightning in a Tesla coil.

I really do recommend listening to the whole record if you can set aside the time and get in the right headspace, but for a brief glimpse, I’ll post the song “Agadez,” which is actually one of the handful of tracks that doesn’t explode out of the gate in the first few seconds, so it might be a bit more digestible as a single. Still, I think the song is a good representation of the album as a whole, especially as it starts to freak out in the second half. Even 16 years later, this project sounds innovative, nervy, and entirely unique in its approach to off-kilter art-rock. The Mars Volta go on tour early next year, and I hope it indicates that this pair of veteran weirdos will still deliver future surprises.

  

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