Album review: Failure – Location Lost

Trials, tribulations and one unfortunate implosion be damned, time has made a success of Failure. While their trilogy of albums in the ’90s (most notably 1996’s classic Fantastic Planet) secured their legacy, their lack of record sales ensured they remained on the outer fringes of rock royalty.

Slowly but surely, however, their cult has been growing. Chino Moreno, Hayley Williams, Maynard James Keenan – these and more have all worshipped at the altar of their cerebral, atmospheric alt.rock and kept their name alive when the band weren’t around to do it. What has been particularly gratifying to witness of late, then, is the way that Failure (Ken Andrews, Greg Edwards and Kelli Scott) have picked up that baton since 2015’s reunion outing The Heart Is A Monster. Indeed, with the arrival of their superb seventh album Location Lost, they have now released more records than they did in their heyday. And that renaissance continues apace.

For anyone expecting the triumphant vibes of Disney/Hulu 2025 documentary Every Time You Lose Your Mind to seep into Location Lost, it hasn’t. Like, at all. Prior to recording, singer/multi-instrumentalist Ken Andrews suffered a painful injury which necessitated back surgery and a protracted stint of recovery. The anguish of that time colours this record in both sound and word, no more so than on lead single The Air’s On Fire. A song that perfectly summons the ache and disorientation of waking up after an operation, it also delivers one of Failure’s best hooks to date courtesy of the ‘It’s never felt this way before’ refrain. The mood, often, is dark, but gorgeously so. Even when a ‘ba ba-ba ba ba-ba’ poppy inflection arrives on the title-track, it is set against a frazzled’n’fuzzed-up musical bedding.

If this all sounds like so far, so Failure, that is often not the case. While Location Lost doesn’t outright obliterate expectations, it certainly works hard to challenge them in places. That much is clear from opener Crash Test Delayed – a song that plays out like their DNA is being spliced with Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails and The Cure (in that order). Even more impressive is Someday Soon. The biggest WTF? moment not only on this album, but in their career, its skittering beat starts off in a vein not all too dissimilar from twenty one pilots’ Lane Boy (no, really) before moving on to chart its own course.

Just as Failure love to keep you on the edge of your seat musically, they also keep you guessing with their lyrics. Confounding, absorbing lines are stockpiled everywhere. Solid State (‘Bleeding off the frames of human time’) is a good example, but Halo & Grain goes beyond. As far as opening lines go, ‘Ripped up clouds, a jaw of sky’ is a gem, and all this before you get to, ‘Roll up your skeleton, take the measurement of loss’. You could enjoy this album simply by reading its lyrics and getting lost in its tangle of uneasy images without ever hearing a note.

On an album of brilliant moments, Location Lost’s two highlights operate at the quieter side of the spectrum. On The Rising Skyline, Hayley Williams fulfils her dream of working with her heroes by making an excellent guest appearance. Here she isn’t searching for the high notes, but rather the right notes. No vocal pyrotechnics, just the sound of Hayley and Ken locked in the same disenchanted ballad, albeit one cunningly broken up by occasional jarring stabs of distortion towards the end.

The other high point comes via closer Moonlight Understands – a vivid, hallucinatory song that sounds like Ken is translating where the mind retreats to while the broken body recuperates. Clearly, he’s wrangled a lot of beauty from his suffering.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: A Perfect Circle, Team Sleep, Quicksand

Location Lost is out now via Failure / Arduous