Failure (16 and Over)

For a band so closely associated with weight, density, and mass, Failure have spent much of their career writing about what happens when those things fall away. Bodies drift. Memories fragment. Signals distort. Gravity fails. But even after 30 years, the hugely influential trio of Ken Andrews, Greg Edwards, and Kelli Scott are still following the sound wherever it leads, even when it’s uncomfortable, unfamiliar, or disruptive. Location Lost, the band’s seventh album and their fourth since improbably reuniting in 2014 after a 17-year-hiatus, doesn’t arrive as a victory lap or a nostalgia exercise. Instead, it sounds like a band actively negotiating where — and who — they are now. “It’s very different,” Edwards says plainly of the nine-song follow-up to 2021’s Wild Type Droid. “There are sounds and parts that really don’t have any precedence within the Failure world.” That sense of divergence is inseparable from how Location Lost came together. Following Wild Type Droid, Failure completed a long-gestating documentary (Every Time You Lose Your Mind) and concert film (We Are Hallucinations) that chronicled their history, drug-marred breakup, and improbable second life playing for a newfound younger and more diverse audience. The process was exhaustive, and revealing. Almost immediately after finishing the film, Andrews suffered a serious back injury that required surgery. The operation was technically successful; the recovery was not. “It kind of messed up my brain chemistry somehow,” he says. “It wasn’t just physical recovery.” By late 2024, Failure were finally able to begin recording in earnest. As with Wild Type Droid, Andrews, Edwards, and Scott rented a studio and spent weeks improvising together as a trio, recording hours of unfiltered material without overthinking where it might lead. But the dynamic inside those sessions had shifted. Andrews, still recovering, felt creatively unmoored. “I was participating, but my editorial side just wasn’t working,” he says.…