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.”