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 stretches the length of three days, made the Space Echo Festival feel as packed with performances. The di?erence this time around, it’s 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 were the obvious draw. The L.A. trio have toured inconsistently since their early 90s genesis, and have released new music at an even less glacial pace. But that’s all changed in 2026 with their album Location Lost. With its sumptuous blasts of drone-y, shoe gaze informed sonic’s and patient songwriting, it already seems like a lock to land on multiple best-of, year-end lists.
So it certainly seemed like a no brainer to turn the Chicago tour stop into something special, so the Cold Waves team somehow crammed nine bands into what played out as a seamless execution of quality and quantity in equal supply.
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 have always shared a musical aesthetic, but there was a definite thread of vibrations that connected each performance, specifically volume and intensity.
Category: Featured
