Octahedron, The Mars Volta’s 5th LP, is hitting stores on June 22nd after, literally, years worth of waiting. Universal Records sat on The Bedlam In Goliath for months, and in that downtime, TMV was able to write and record another album. The band was so ahead of the curve that a snippet of an early demo of Beneath The Eyelids (a track on Octahedron) leaked to the internet before Bedlam did! Omar Rodriguez-Lopez characterized this as an “acoustic” album last year, and their acousitc performance of Beneath The Eyelids at a New York New Year’s Eve show sparked speculation even further, but when the band got questions about their upcoming acoustic record everytime they did an interview, Cedric, the groups vocalist, walked it back a little bit. “If Bedlam’s volume 10,” he said, “LP5 is on volume 8. Which is mellow for us.”

Now that we’re closing in on Octahedron’s release, there’s a flood of details coming out – here’s the official tracklist.

Clocking in at roughly 45 minutes, Octahedron looks like it’ll be a compact, focused record – for a Mars Volta CD, anyway. Jeff Jordan’s the guy who does most of TMV’s cover art, and we’ve got pretty good indications that this is the cover:

While this hasn’t been officially confirmed, we’ve got plenty of clues.

1. First, this image syncs up really well with the mountain image that’s on the background of TMV’s shop at Hello Merch.
2. Alright. See the main image on that page? The one right here?
   
   It looks a lot like Cotopaxi, a mountain in the Andes. Cotopaxi’s also -surprise!-the name of a track on Octahedron.
3. Oh, and Jeff Jordan signed it.

We’ve also got confirmation from Universal that Cotopaxi is going to be the new single – an enterprising fan grabbed a radio rip a little before it’s official release. Be warned, the quality isn’t thrilling.

I’m so hyped for this.

Tags: new music, The Mars Volta

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