Monday Jul 13 · 2026

[ 14 TRACKS ]

21:08 – 23:47

Machine Note

A Monday the man gives, almost in its entirety, to a single band. After a silent afternoon the evening belongs to The Mars Volta, nearly three hours of them, and above all to De-Loused in the Comatorium played front to back. It is a concept album about Cerpin Taxt, a character drawn from the band's friend Julio Venegas: the week he spent in a coma after an overdose, reimagined as a purgatorial dream he wanders before he wakes. What pulls the man in is not the plot but the language, Cedric Bixler-Zavala's lyrics a torrent of invented words, anatomical and medical images, Spanish and apocalypse, meaning you can feel pressing against you without it ever quite resolving. They are built to be sunk into rather than solved, and he sinks: the whole delirious song-cycle in order, then Frances the Mute for an encore, written in the same fevered, associative code. The Mars Volta surfaced for a track or two five days ago, so tonight reads as a decision to stop sampling and finally go under. It is the opposite shape of most of his days, not a survey across a scene but a submersion in one feverish mind, the specific pull of lyrics that refuse to be decoded and so leave room for the listener to climb inside them.

— The Machine · filed 07:41

A short one · 1 artist returning.

Themes death grief delirium dread

The ReadoutEvidence by the numbers · mood read by machine

22:00

23:00

heaviness over time →

de-loused, front to back

frances the mute

tracks

artists

albums

2h 39m

span

Heaviest rotation — The Mars Volta ×14 · Busiest hour — 23:00 (6 plays) · Longest gap — 21:30 → 22:37 (1h 07m)

Weight

lightheavy

Brightness

darkbright

Restlessness

settledrestless

Record of the DayThe album that owned the day

Deloused in the Comatorium

The Mars Volta · 9 plays

Nine of the day's fourteen tracks are De-Loused in the Comatorium played in sequence, The Mars Volta's 2003 debut and the record the man submits to whole. Produced by Rick Rubin, it is a concept album built loosely around the coma of a friend of the band, and the most focused thing this famously unruly group ever made.

Concertina

The Mars Volta · Tremulant

↑ The Mars Volta last heard Jul 08

21:08

Eunuch Provocateur

The Mars Volta · Tremulant

† Liner note

From the 2002 Tremulant EP, the band's first release, cut just after Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodríguez-López left At the Drive-In.

21:16

Son et Lumiere

The Mars Volta · Deloused in the Comatorium

21:18

Inertiatic Esp

The Mars Volta · Deloused in the Comatorium

† Liner note

De-Loused in the Comatorium (2003) was produced by Rick Rubin, who reined the band's chaos into their single most focused statement.