Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	(72/100)
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic
Alternative Press
Entertainment Weekly	B+
The Guardian
musicOMH
NME	(7/10)
The Observer
Paste	(6.8/10)
PopMatters
Rolling Stone

Noctourniquet is the sixth and final studio album by American progressive rock band The Mars Volta, released on March 26, 2012 on Warner Bros.. Produced by guitarist and songwriter Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, it is the band's only studio album to feature drummer Deantoni Parks, and the only album not to include contributions from guitarist John Frusciante.

Inspired by the children's nursery rhyme "Solomon Grundy", and the Greek myth of Hyacinthus,Noctourniquet is a concept album. Vocalist Cedric Bixler Zavala comments, "It's about embracing life for what it should be. There's a view of the elitist lifestyle - that being an artist is unattainable. I'm trying to write this story that reminds people that we're all artists."

Noctourniquet debuted on the Billboard 200 at #15 with 21,000 albums sold in its first week. In Canada, the album debuted at #44 on the Canadian Albums Chart. In its second week of sales, the album dropped 85 places to #100 on the Billboard 200.

Much of Noctourniquet was recorded in 2009, shortly after the band finished mixing their previous studio album, Octahedron. An argument, however, between composer and guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and vocalist and lyricist Cedric Bixler-Zavala, resulted in Bixler-Zavala's contributions taking up to two and a half years to be completed. Rodriguez-Lopez noted, "He and I have very few arguments after twenty years of being friends, and we sort of got into this argument. He felt that he’s been trying to keep up with my pace for all these years, and it’s not natural for him, and he didn’t think we had to put out a record every year. He wanted to take his time with it, and he didn’t like me being on top of him like I usually am. [...] So I said okay, well, you have the record in your hands. When you’re ready, you’ll call me and we’ll do it. And a year went by, two years went by, and I sort of started telling him well, wait a minute. [...] It was just a strange record for me. I’m used to taking what I always say are snapshots — Polaroid shots — of where I’m at, and this is more like a long, drawn-out... something."

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