Failure have released their seventh full-length album, Location Lost, and on the same day Ken Andrews said the band is still trying to answer a question that should have been settled years ago: what it means to be in Failure now. The record arrived on April 24, 2026, as the rebooted Los Angeles cult favorite returned with a fourth LP since its 2014 comeback.
Andrews spoke shortly after the release about the band’s past, present and future, saying the group came into the writing sessions with some stress because they were thinking about their identity as much as their songs. He said the documentary Every Time You Lose Your Mind filled the space that might otherwise have been taken by an album cycle, giving the group a different kind of chapter before Location Lost landed.
That sense of continuity matters because Failure’s story has always been split in two. The band broke up in 1997 after addiction issues inside the group and mistreatment from their label, then returned 12 years ago for a second run of recording and touring. Since then, Andrews, Greg Edwards and Kellii Scott have kept going as a tighter unit, and the new album stretches from the trip-hop intro of Crash Test Delayed to the art-rock of Someday Soon.
Hayley Williams is one of the band’s best-known admirers, and she also appears on Failure’s song The Rising Skyline. Her involvement fits the arc of a group that spent years away from the spotlight only to find its audience had kept expanding in the meantime, with admirers including Williams and David Dastmalchian. Andrews said the challenge now is holding onto the band’s sound while still moving forward, and that the answer lies in keeping some consistency without freezing the records in place.
He said the band has long been more focused on getting it right, recalling that it was not until Fantastic Planet in 1996 that they felt they had found the sound they wanted. On the rebooted version of Failure, he said, that fight with labels was no longer the issue; the harder task was preserving an identity after so many years apart. The title Location Lost was suggested by Edwards, and it lands as the clearest marker yet that this second era is no longer a return so much as its own chapter.
The question now is not whether Failure can still make a record that sounds like Failure. Location Lost answers that. The real test is whether the band can keep stretching that sound without losing the history that made people come back in the first place.