Failure make a long-awaited return to Vancouver
By the time Failure took the stage at the Rickshaw Theatre on Friday night, the room was already packed wall to wall. The crowd looked exactly like the kind of audience you would expect for a band like Failure: plenty of neon hair, black clothes, piercings and alternative fashion, but without feeling like one particular generation had claimed the room. There were longtime fans who had clearly been waiting years to see the band again, alongside younger listeners who have probably discovered Failure through the bands they influenced.
Quannnic opened the night, and the pairing was just right. Their set felt like a younger, more digitally shaped version of the same atmospheric world Failure occupies—heavy guitars, spacious production and an underlying darkness that never quite disappeared.
Failure finally walked onstage at around 9:15, and the small room immediately felt even smaller. The Rickshaw holds roughly 500 people, and when it is full, there is very little distance between the audience and the stage.
The venue itself has a history that adds to the atmosphere. The building originally opened in 1971 as the Shaw Theatre, part of the Shaw Brothers’ film empire and once a major centre for Hong Kong cinema on the West Coast. After closing in the 1980s, it sat largely dormant for more than two decades before being transformed into the Rickshaw Theatre in 2009. Since then, it has become one of Vancouver’s important smaller live-music rooms, hosting everything from punk and metal to indie and alternative rock.
The Rickshaw’s exposed, slightly rough-around-the-edges character complemented Failure’s sound rather than trying to polish it away. The atmosphere was distinctly grungy and alternative, but the audience itself was remarkably mixed in age and gender. It felt less like a nostalgia show and more like different generations meeting around the same music.
Failure have had a long and unusually interrupted career. Ken Andrews and Greg Edwards formed the Los Angeles band in 1990, releasing Comfort in 1992 and Magnified in 1994 before reaching cult status with Fantastic Planet in 1996. They broke up in 1997, just as their influence was beginning to extend beyond their immediate audience, and reunited in 2014 after a 17-year hiatus. Since returning, they have released several albums, including The Heart Is a Monster, In the Future Your Body Will Be the Furthest Thing from Your Mind, and 2021’s Wild Type Droid.
Their latest record, Location Lost, released in April 2026, is the band’s seventh studio album and their fourth since reuniting. This album pushes further into atmospheric and sometimes unfamiliar territory. “The Air’s on Fire” leans into the band’s heavier, disorienting side, while “A Way Down” brings in a darker, more angular influence reminiscent of early-’80s post-punk. “The Rising Skyline,” featuring Hayley Williams, is a much more restrained moment and shows how much room Failure are willing to leave inside their songs.
Those newer songs sat naturally beside the older material. Recent 2026 sets have included “A Way Down,” “Smoking Umbrellas,” “The Air’s on Fire,” “Counterfeit Sky,” “Headstand,” “Frogs,” “Macaque,” “Undone,” “Sergeant Politeness,” “Submarines,” “Stuck on You” and “Heliotropic,” with “The Rising Skyline,” “The Nurse Who Loved Me” and “Another Space Song” appearing as encore material at some shows.
What stood out most about the performance, though, was the lighting. Failure could have easily relied on the predictable dark-room aesthetic that comes with this kind of music, but instead the lighting kept changing. Colours, intensity and angles shifted throughout the set, sometimes making the stage look almost industrial and then suddenly opening it up into something much more expansive. You never quite knew what the next lighting change would look like, and it gave familiar songs a different visual character.
Failure’s last Vancouver appearance was in April 2019, when they played the city’s Venue alongside Swervedriver. Seven years later, their return to Vancouver felt appropriately intimate; a packed room on East Hastings where the band’s dense guitars filled every corner.
