The Gravity of Failure

There were never any flowers for Failure. But with Fantastic Planet, they made the kind of record that haunts the air long after the transmission ends. Like Ken Andrews and Greg Edwards didn’t craft these songs—they found them buried under reactor ash and starlight, humming faintly through lead walls. This is a record that doesn’t beg to be understood. It slinks through your bloodstream and waits. A slow, narcotic unspooling. A terminal transmission for the romantically poisoned.

Failure weren’t built for the ‘90s alt-rock conveyor belt. They didn’t wear the right stripes. They didn’t churn out hooks like they were flipping burgers. No plaid mascot frontman, no cutesy heroin myth. They were precision freaks—surgical and submerged. Space-rock with scabs. If Magnified hinted at what they could do with distortion and depth, Fantastic Planet was the full autopsy: seventeen tracks of beautiful rot, disintegrating in real time.

It opens in slow motion—“Saturday Saviour” crawling in on that lurching, drop-D riff, like a shuttle returning to Earth half-melted, carrying dead weight and false promises. It’s immediate but not obvious. This isn’t a song that wants to sell itself. It wants to haunt. And it does. Every track here is drenched in this woozy, post-narcotic haze, like a hangover from a dream you don’t want to wake from.

Failure weren’t chasing hits, they were mapping out the interior geography of a certain kind of numbness. The kind you earn. The kind you wear like a suit of dust. They wrote songs for the late-night, TV-snow generation—kids whose best conversations happened at three a.m. with a Walkman and a busted ceiling fan. You can hear it in “Pillowhead,” that blast of sci-fi sludge that sounds like Sonic Youth playing through an intercom in a psych ward. Or “Blank,” which drips with the kind of resigned clarity you only get when you’ve stopped trying to win and just start documenting the wreckage.

But it’s “The Nurse Who Loved Me” that hits like a syringe full of mercury. Sweet, cold, and lethal. A ballad that masquerades as a love song before revealing itself as a psychotic episode. The delivery is almost too sincere, which is what makes it so brutal. Andrews sings it like he believes it—like he’s found salvation in his own delusion. That’s the trick with Failure: they weaponize sincerity. They lull you in with melody, then crack the floor out from under you.

Sonically, Fantastic Planet is a war machine built from spare parts—swooning vocal layers, dive-bombing guitars, bass that coils like a live wire under your skin. It’s produced within an inch of its life but never sterile. Everything’s saturated, bleeding into everything else, like watercolors left out in the rain. It’s dense without being bloated. Cinematic, but not in a cheap, epic kind of way. More like 2001 if HAL wrote the score during a breakdown.

And it doesn’t let up. Even the segues—the “Segue” tracks that stitch the record together—feel like they were composed with the same obsessive care. Not filler, not interludes. They’re glue. Psychedelic ligaments holding together a disintegrating body. By the time you get to “Heliotropic” and “Daylight,” you’ve been through a goddamn journey. Not a story arc. A drift. You don’t finish Fantastic Planet so much as come to. Somewhere else. Somewhere off-course. Like you’ve been sleepwalking through airlock doors and only just realized the oxygen’s gone. There’s no arc here. No tidy climax. Just a slow dissolve. A long slide into the static.

It feels like a concept record, but not in the way bands say that when they’ve got a theme and a press quote ready. This one doesn’t pitch you a narrative—it just drags you into its orbit and lets you rot there. Whatever the concept was, it got buried under feedback and sedatives. What’s left is mood. Motion. The sound of something breaking quietly and never getting fixed.

Of course, nobody cared when it dropped. Fantastic Planet came out in ninety-six, got zero radio play, and sunk like a stone. Released on Slash/Warner at a time when the label was more interested in flogging the dying horse of grunge than giving room to weird, ambitious art-rock. Failure broke up not long after, because that’s what happens when you make your masterpiece and the world shrugs.

But the world was wrong.

The cult around Fantastic Planet didn’t happen overnight. It grew slowly, like rust. Passed along between headphone kids and late-night obsessives. It didn’t date because it was never trendy to begin with. It exists out of time. It still sounds fresher than most of what passes for alternative music now—because it was never really alternative to begin with. It was its own planet. We just hadn’t landed on it yet.

Now, nearly three decades later, it’s clear what this album is. A monolith. A holy text for the emotionally literate. A love letter to entropy. And not in a fake-deep, Tumblr-poetry kind of way. This is the sound of being truly, cosmically lost—and making peace with it. Not fixing it. Not pretending it gets better. Just documenting the drift with heartbreaking clarity.

Failure didn’t fail. The rest of us just showed up late.

Update: I should’ve stopped at Fantastic Planet. Should’ve let the curtain fall. But I didn’t. I went backward, into Magnified, Comfort, into the grainy premonitions. I went forward, into the resurrection albums—The Heart is a Monster, Wild Type Droid—and found new damage to catalog. Different scars, same bloodstream. Now I’m too deep. This isn’t a one-off. This is a spiral. Consider this the first dispatch. There will be more. Failure didn’t just pull me in. They rewired the signal.