During the year in which its hugely influential 1996 album Fantastic Planet turns 30, Failure will not only release its fourth LP since reuniting in 2014 after a 17-year hiatus but also return to the road in support of it this spring. Location Lost is out April 24 on the band’s own Failure Records imprint through band manager Blaze James’ new Arduous Records label and Virgin Music Group. Lead single “The Air’s on Fire” is out now.
Core members Ken Andrews, Greg Edwards and Kellii Scott began jamming on the material that would turn into the nine new songs on Location Lost in late 2024, after they finished a long-in-the-works documentary on the band, Every Time You Lose Your Mind. Andrews was still recovering at the time from complicated back surgery and channeled the experience into “The Air’s on Fire,” which has a heavy, breathless sonic quality akin to struggling to fill the lungs.
“My blood pressure dropped so low that all these doctors came rushing in,” Andrews tells SPIN of what he remembers from waking up after the operation. “I was barely conscious and everything just started spinning. It wasn’t that it was hot, but you know that effect when it’s a hot day and you look down the street and you see the heat waves? That’s what everything looked like to me.”
The follow-up to 2021’s Wild Type Droid, Location Lost filters aging, uncertainty, personal loss and nostalgia through Failure’s signature psychedelic sound, with highlights including the head-nodding opener “Crash Test Delayed,” the prog-dusted “Halo and Grain” (“it sounds almost like King Crimson to me,” says Andrews) and “Someday Soon,” which was built on a shuffling Scott beat and Edwards’ deft fretwork on guitar strings being hovered over by an E-bow. “It’s very different,” Edwards says of the album. “There are sounds and parts that really don’t have any precedence within the Failure world.”
Elsewhere, Failure and Paramore’s Hayley Williams finally connect on an original song, “The Rising Skyline,” after years of mutual admiration that includes her on-camera appearance Every Time You Lose Your Mind. Andrews played Williams some new Failure tracks in early 2025 as they rehearsed an acoustic version of Failure’s “Daylight” for a Los Angeles fire relief benefit and asked if she’d like to sing on one of them. She wound up choosing “Skyline,” which as a largely acoustic breakup song feels like a new frontier in a Failure catalog loaded with spaced-out, methodically produced music.
“She’s one of a kind. She is the real deal,” says Andrews, who mixed Paramore’s 2013 self-titled album. “She has mentioned us so many times now in various formats that her audience just can’t avoid us, basically. A certain percentage of them have really discovered us and latched on.”
To that end, Failure will introduce material from Location Lost on a spring club tour, which begins April 21 in Log Angeles and features support from New Jersey shoegaze band All Under Heaven. Click here for tickets, which go on sale Friday (Feb. 20).
Here is the track list for Location Lost:
01 – Crash Test Delayed02 – The Rising Skyline featuring Hayley Williams03 – Solid State04 – The Air’s on Fire05 – Halo and Grain06 – Someday Soon07 – Location Lost08 – A Way Down09 – Moonlight Understands
Here are Failure’s tour dates:
Apr 21 Los Angeles, CA – ZebulonApr 25 Las Vegas – Sick New World FestivalMay 02 Chicago, IL – SPACE ECHO @ RadiusMay 03 Cleveland, OH – Grog Shop May 05 Nashville, TN – Basement East May 06 Atlanta, GA Masquerade – HellMay 08 Daytona Beach, FL – Welcome To Rockville Festival May 09 Asheville, NC – Eulogy May 10 Carrboro, NC – Cat’s CradleMay 12 New York, NY – Le Poisson RougeMay 13 Cambridge, MA – Sinclair May 14 Hamden, CT – SpaceMay 15 Washington, DC – Union Stage May 16 Harrisburg, PA – Arrow at Archer Music HallMay 17 Philadelphia, PA – Underground Arts May 19 Detroit, MI – ShelterMay 20 Toronto, ON – Opera HouseOct 24 Dallas, TX – Sick New World Festival
