Photo Gallery: Failure and Baroness at Space Echo Festival • Radius • Chicago
Failure and Baroness
Space Echo Festival
Radius
Chicago, IL
May 2nd, 2026
Recap and photos by Curt Baran
Somehow, the same people who brought us Cold Waves, a touchstone festival for Industrial music that spans three days, made the Space Echo Festival feel as packed with performances. The difference this time around, the actual elapsed time was a mere half of a day.
Hosted by Radius, the venue ran two stages in separate music halls, which meant very little down time (if any), between acts. Headliners’ Failure was the obvious draw. The L.A. trio has toured inconsistently since their early-90s genesis and has released new music at an even slower pace. But that’s all changed in 2026 with their album Location Lost. With its sumptuous blasts of drone-y, shoegaze-informed sonics and patient songwriting, it already seems like a lock to land on multiple best-of and year-end lists.
So it certainly seemed like a no-brainer to turn the Chicago tour stop into something special, and the Cold Waves team somehow crammed nine bands into what played out as a seamless blend of quality and quantity.
They packed the lineup with Slow Mass, Ringo DS, Open Hand, Spotlights, Shiner, Torche, And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, and what certainly felt like a co-headliner slot for Baroness. Spread across one evening, the bands might not always have shared a musical aesthetic, but there was a definite thread of vibrations connecting each performance, particularly in volume and intensity.
Category: Featured
