“I woke up hallucinating. It felt like a really bad acid trip. I tried to talk about that in the song”: Failure’s Ken Andrews is one of alt-rock's most influential tonesmiths. He talks teaming up with Hayley Williams and his return from near-death

Ken Andrews, vocalist and guitarist with alternative rock group Failure, photographed before a live performance at The Garage in London on May 18, 2015.

During early sessions for Failure’s recently-released seventh album, Location Lost, frontman and guitarist Ken Andrews was creatively unmoored and all but absent.

In 2021, he’d convened with multi-instrumentalist Greg Edwards and drummer Kellii Scott to improvise new music for Wild Type Droid – tracked to Pro Tools, and then developed into songs – with some of those snapshots ending up in the album’s final mix.