A bass line keeps circling back in a Los Angeles studio, and Juan Alderete is the one holding it together while everything else gets dismantled. The Mars Volta were not polishing their third album in late 2005 and early 2006 — they were rebuilding it. Amputechture, released on September 12, 2006 through Gold Standard Laboratories and Universal Records, arrived after sessions in Los Angeles, El Paso, and Melbourne that produced far more discarded tape than finished music.
Omar Rodriguez-Lopez produced the record himself, which meant the guitarist and songwriter had final say over every layer. That authority translated into a brutal editing process: much of the material was written and recorded from scratch, while other pieces pulled from older ideas the band had been carrying for years. The result was an album that felt less like a follow-up and more like an excavation of everything the Mars Volta had not yet used.
A Shifting Lineup Behind the Board
The lineup shifted around that process. Drummer Jon Theodore played his final studio album with the group here, his rhythms anchoring tracks that would outlast his tenure. At the same time, Paul Hinojos arrived on guitar and keyboards, fresh from At the Drive-In and Sparta. Hinojos stepped into a band that was already rewriting its own history in real time.
Some of that history went back further than fans realized. The song Viscera Eyes grew from a piece Omar had written during his At the Drive-In years, a fragment that waited nearly a decade to find its final shape. Day of the Baphomets borrowed lyrics and melody from an unreleased track called A Plague Upon Your Hissing Children, originally recorded for De-Loused in the Comatorium.
Mixing the Progressive Sprawl
Those recycled parts did not make Amputechture sound old. Rich Costey handled the mixing, and the album's progressive rock sprawl pushed against every boundary the band had set on previous records. The sessions in Melbourne added another layer of distance, as if the geography itself forced the songs to stretch further than they would have in one room.
When the record hit stores, the response was immediate. It entered the Billboard 200 at number nine, moving more than 59,000 copies in its first week. By 2009, that number had climbed to around 400,000, making Amputechture one of the band's most commercially visible statements without a radio-friendly single to anchor it.
Transformation Heard in the Final Tracks
What listeners heard was a band in the middle of transformation. Theodore's last performance on a Mars Volta studio album gave the rhythm section a particular tension, while Hinojos added textures that had not existed on previous releases. The album's title suggested amputation and architecture, a fitting frame for music built from removed parts and reconstructed structures.
Twenty years later, in 2026, the album still resists easy categorization. The progressive rock label covers only part of what happens across its tracks. The older material woven into newer compositions, the unreleased De-Loused song finally finding a home, the lineup changes—all of it points to a band that treated its own past as raw material rather than something to preserve.
Somewhere in those sessions, a version of A Plague Upon Your Hissing Children finally stopped being a demo and became part of something else entirely. The title was gone, but the melody survived, folded into Day of the Baphomets. That is the sound Amputechture leaves behind: old ideas refusing to die, just waiting for the right moment to be cut open and rearranged.