Alt-rock mainstays Failure roll into Pawtucket's The Met on October 14, bringing a sound that quietly shaped bands like Tool, Deftones, and Paramore over three decades. The Los Angeles trio — frontman Ken Andrews, multi-instrumentalist Greg Edwards, and drummer Kellii Scott — will share the bill with rising Florida shoegaze artist quannnic, who opens the show at 8 p.m.
The concert, first detailed by The Valley Breeze, lands inside Hope Artiste Village at 1005 Main St., a general-admission room with a capacity of roughly 500 people, according to Vivid Seats. The Met itself has a long Rhode Island pedigree, having first opened in 1975 as The Met Café in Providence's Jewelry District before owner Rich Lupo relocated the venue twice and settled it into Pawtucket's Hope Artiste Village in 2010, per Visit Rhode Island.
A New Album Built From Jam Sessions
Failure arrives touring behind “Location Lost,” released in April 2026 and marking the band's first studio record in five years. The Valley Breeze reports the album grew out of extended recordings of the trio simply playing together, with select passages later developed into finished songs.
One of those songs, “The Rising Skyline,” features a guest vocal from Paramore's Hayley Williams. According to the same report, Andrews sent Williams songs from the new record and invited her to sing on a track, and she chose that one herself. Williams has been a Failure fan since high school, and Paramore itself formed around the band as one of its foundational influences, the outlet notes.
From Steve Albini Sessions to Space-Rock Reunion
Failure's reach into modern rock traces back to its earliest records. The band's 1992 debut, “Comfort,” was tracked with producer Steve Albini at Minnesota's Pachyderm Studio, before Andrews and Edwards opted to self-produce every subsequent album to control their own sound textures, according to Wikipedia. That self-produced approach defined 1996's “Fantastic Planet,” a 68-minute, 17-track breakthrough on Slash/Warner Bros. that spawned the charting single “Stuck on You.” The album missed the Billboard 200 at the time but has since become a cult touchstone, as Louder details.
Failure broke up in 1997 and reunited in 2014, and the band's comeback has produced steady studio output rather than just nostalgia touring. Since reforming, the group released “The Heart Is a Monster” in 2015, “In the Future Your Body Will Be the Furthest Thing from Your Mind” in 2018, and “Wild Type Droid” in 2021, a run documented by Bass Magazine. Along the way, members of the band also teamed with Tool bassist Paul D'Amour in the early 1990s to form Replicants, a side project whose 1995 self-titled covers album featured guest vocals from Tool's Maynard James Keenan — a detail underscoring just how tightly the two bands' orbits once overlapped.
Failure's Rhode Island ties aren't purely musical, either. The Valley Breeze reports the band had equipment stolen from its van somewhere in Rhode Island back in the 1990s, a decades-old footnote that makes the return to Pawtucket something of a homecoming with history attached.
Opener Quannnic Brings a Younger Shoegaze Wave
Opening the night is quannnic, the shoegaze project of Florida-based musician Nick Quan. The act broke through nationally in 2023 when the track “Life Imitates Life,” from the 2022 album “Kenopsia,” climbed to No. 23 on Billboard's Hot Hard Rock Songs chart and No. 9 on Spotify's Viral 50, according to New Noise Magazine.
Quannnic has since built out a growing catalog, releasing “Stepdream” in November 2023 and “Warbrained” in August 2025, and has previously toured with shoegaze veterans Slowdive and digicore artist Jane Remover, per AllMusic. Pairing a 21-year-old viral shoegaze artist with a 1990s space-rock band on the same bill makes for a fitting snapshot of how Failure's influence has trickled down to a newer generation of guitar-driven acts.
Inside a Converted Textile Mill
The show's setting adds its own layer of local history. Hope Artiste Village occupies a 7-acre former textile mill complex built in 1889 for the Hope Webbing Company, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2006. Today the complex houses more than 100 small businesses and art studios, along with the seasonal Farm Fresh RI Wintertime Farmers Market, according to the Official Guide to Experiencing Pawtucket, making The Met one piece of a much larger creative hub inside the old mill.
Failure plays The Met in Pawtucket on October 14, with quannnic opening the evening at 8 p.m.
