Reunited Space Rock Trio Failure Return With New Album ‘Wild Type Droid’

Reunited space rock trio Failure return in December with Wild Type Droid, the Los Angeles band’s third album since their reunion in 2013.

Ahead of the album’s December 3rd release on their own Failure Music – and available to preorder now – the group unleashed the first single “Headstand.”

“The lyrics come from my earliest memory of spacing-out in my room when I was seven, trying to conceive of infinity and watching the dust falling through the bars of sunlight pouring through my blinds,” Failure’s Greg Edwards said in a statement. “I had heard that a lot of that dust was made up of skin cells and that really stuck with me. It’s kind of a love song to those bizarre innocent moments of solitude

After a series of incredibly expansive, hour-plus LPs — 2015’s The Heart Is a Monster boasted 18 songs, 2018’s In the Future Your Body Will Be the Furthest Thing from Your Mind contained 16 — Wild Type Droid distills the band’s space rock epics into 10 songs and just over 40 minutes.

“To me, it captures a lot of the new musical approaches and techniques we were going for on this album, but somehow is still quintessential Failure,” bassist/singer Ken Andrews added. 

“We’ve been together long enough to know that some of our best ideas come directly from these experimental sessions. For this album, we simply cultivated that methodology for a much longer time than we have in the past. It brought out the trio aspect of the band. There was a feeling we could really push the individual parts further away from each other and let the more interesting and challenging combinations take center stage.”

Wild Type Droid’s front cover — a return of sorts to the astronaut-adorning front cover for 1996’s Fantastic Planet — also borrows the image “Innerspace” by artist and NFT king Beeple. “This feels like a good place and time to abandon the space iconography and theme once and for all,” Edwards said. “In a lot of ways, this album feels like a return to earth. All minds have been called back to their bodies. There’s a lot to attend to right in front of us.”

After releasing three albums in the mid-Nineties before breaking up in 1997, Failure — now established as a cult favorite among alternative rock fans — have recorded three additional albums since their 2013 reunion, as well as released a career retrospective box set in 2019.

Wild Type Droid Track List

1. Water With Hands
2. Headstand
3. A Lifetime of Joy
4. Submarines
5. Bring Back the Sound
6. Mercury Mouth
7. Undecided
8. Long Division
9. Bad Translation
10. Half Moon