The Mars Volta tease “La Realidad De Los Sueños” in new video | NME

Eight years after they formally broke up, The Mars Volta have posted a mysterious six-second teaser video to social media.

The clip was shared via Clouds Hill Music, a recording studio in Hamburg, Germany that Mars Volta guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez has called his “second home”. In 2020, he released a triple solo album called ‘The Clouds Hill Tapes’.

It features ambient sound from ‘Son Et Lumiere’, the opening track to the band’s debut album ‘Deloused In The Comatorium’. In very brief flashes, the words “The Mars Volta” and “La Realidad De Los Sueños”, meaning “the reality of dreams” appear on screen.

The Spanish phrase also appears in the song ‘Concertina’ from The Mars Volta’s 2002 debut EP ‘Tremulant’.

Watch the teaser below.

A Mars Volta reunion has been hinted at by the band several times over the last two years. In 2019, vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala effectively confirmed it when he told a fan on Twitter that “it’s happening”.

In a further update, Cedric said the reunion would see them leaning heavily on new material.

“What it’s NOT going to be is your ‘fav member lineup’ playing their ‘classic records’ in full etc. Maybe we’ll play old shit, who knows how we feel,” he said on Twitter.

“Just remember our past campaigns never relied on playing requests or going fully backwards …it’s new shit, new people, left turns, tangent inconsistencies, mazapan dreams and churro wishes.

“I will say this though, when ORL played me a grip of new shit I fucking cried. Like Claire Daines in Romeo & Juliet cried. Yeah it was fucking weird. It’s in its infancy right now. No deadlines, no ball tripping, no drama, just 2 grown ass men using essential oils and bold new perfumes shooting ideas and scooting their ass across the fucking lawn trying to get rid of these worms.”

In mid-2020, the narrative took a turn for the bizarre when Kanye West, in the midst of a failed and frenzied presidential campaign, suggested that he had collaborated on an unfinished album with The Mars Volta.

He shared a clip of a sports documentary which was soundtracked by the prog-rock’s band song ‘The Widow’, and wrote: “The Mars Volta we need to finish the album.”

The Mars Volta released six studio albums and broke up in 2013 after founding members Bixler-Zavala and Rodríguez-López fell out. They quickly made amends and formed a new band, Antemasque. They also revamped their pre-Mars Volta outfit, At-the-Drive-In for a new album in 2017.