I have it on good authority that ‘90s alt-rock legends Failure’s return to Underground Arts (which they last played in 2022) this coming Sunday, May 17th, is very nearly sold out… When I was at the Eraserhood basement for BRONCHO’s 10-year celebration of Double Vanity on April 23rd, I was told 500 of the 650 tickets were already gone… In fact, about half of the dates on Failure’s current run – which kicked off April 21st in LA and wraps May 20th in Toronto – have sold out. “We’re getting a really good turnout. Last night in Atlanta was probably my favorite night so far. The crowd was really into it, and we were a few shows into it, so we’re starting to loosen up a little bit and not make as many mistakes,” jokes Failure vocalist, guitarist, and co-founder Ken Andrews during a recent phone chat.
Failure are currently touring behind Location Lost, their seventh studio album and fourth since reuniting in 2014 after a 17-year hiatus, officially making the majority of their catalogue part of their second run as a band, a chapter that Andrews says he wasn’t expecting but has very much been enjoying: “The very first tour coming back in 2014, the Tree of Stars tour, was definitely a highlight. I had kind of retired from being an artist, so getting another chance to go out and tour in front of excited audiences was not on my Bingo card.” Ken goes on to tell me that those audiences Failure has been experiencing in recent years have also not been exactly what he and co-founder/bassist Greg Edwards and longtime drummer Kelli Scott would have anticipated.
“What we’ve noticed in the last couple of albums is that our audience has kind of shifted and become younger. Our manager sent us a Spotify chart showing that our biggest demographic is now 18-35, by a large margin, and over 55 is now the smallest. It could be that over 55 is listening to physical copies, but I just thought that was interesting. We see that at the concerts, too, in terms of the audiences showing up at the shows, a lot of younger people discovering us on this album or the previous couple albums. That’s been really cool!”
Without a doubt, the most notable of Failure’s younger fans, who somewhat recently aged out of the 18-35 demographic, is Paramore’s Hayley Williams, who has long been vocal about her love of the group and appeared in 2025 Hulu documentary Every Time You Lose Your Mind: A Film About Failure (also featuring the likes of Margaret Cho, Tommy, Lee, and Maynard James Keenan), a 10-year project which Andrews wound up directing himself after the pandemic forced the initial filmmakers to move on to other projects. Ken has known Hayley for more than a decade now, first working with Ms. Williams on Paramore’s 2013 self-titled LP, which he mixed, in addition to providing some keys and backing vocals: “Since then, we’ve just developed a bit of a texting friendship; she tells me what she’s up to, I tell her what we’re up to.”
This friendship is what lead to Failure’s latest single, “The Rising Skyline,” which dropped on April 21st – three days before Location Lost hit shelves – and features Hayley Williams: “[After hearing the album’s demos] she mentioned that song in particular as a type of song we hadn’t really done before. And a light bulb went off in my head of her voice being in that song, and I asked her to sing on it.” “The Rising Skyline” isn’t the only Failure anomaly of sorts on Location Lost, which the band considers their most varied release yet and forced Greg and Kelli to step up a bit more than usual in the songwriting process as Andrews was recovering from a serious surgery when the album’s initial writing period began.
“I had a back injury and subsequent surgery that wasn’t a fun experience. I had some problems with the anesthesia that they gave me and when I came out, I didn’t come out like I had on previous surgeries, where I was just a little foggy and a little sleepy. This was like full-on hallucinations and super high heart rate and blood pressure, and they ended up coding me in the hospital and it was kind of a frightening experience. I kind of knew that as I started to feel better, I was probably going to write some lyrics about that, and that’s where ‘The Air’s on Fire’ came from.”
While Ken tells me that Failure are enjoying playing a handful of Location Lost tracks on their current dates, he also says that the band are more than happy to play a good number of the classics that made them legends: “We don’t have any problem playing a bunch of songs from Fantastic Planet. That’s kind of the album that people are most familiar with, so there’s always a good chunk of songs from that album.” Those astute fans of Failure are surely aware that this August will be the 30th anniversary of Fantastic Planet, their third and final album of their initial tenure (which includes Billboard hit “Stuck on You”) and the album that Andrews tells me came to define how the band records together.
“That’s the record where the label decided to let us produce it ourselves. We’d been kind of moving towards that concept on the previous record, but they still weren’t really comfortable with us taking the reins. But — based on the demos for the previous record, Magnified, which they’d really liked — they said okay and they allowed us to take our recording budget and buy a bunch of home recording gear and rent a house, move into it, live there, and make it ourselves. So it was a completely different experience than we were used to having… the sort of hourly rate or day rate you pay to a studio, where you always feel like you have to come in completely prepared and have all the material pre-planned ahead of time. Fantastic Planet was kind of the opposite of that. We wanted to come up with the material on the spot and capture that freshness and spontaneity that’s really hard to do in the traditional studio paradigm. And it seemed to really work for us, so we’ve been kind of following that path ever since.”
*Get your tickets here.
**Listen for Failure’s favorite Fantastic Planet track to play live this Friday, May 15th, on Philthy Radio, 9-11pm on Y-Not Radio.
