RPM Fest is like a family reunion that you didn’t know you were invited to.
That’s according to Liam Malone, who serves on the board of directors for The Heavy Culture Cooperative, a cooperative music venue and art bar owned by members, artists and fans. Running from Friday, Sept. 4, through Sunday, Sept. 6, this feeling of a family reunion could be seen throughout RPM Fest as fans of punk, rock and metal music greeted each other like old friends, in many cases despite the fact that the festival marks the only time of year that they get to see each other.
This wasn’t just limited to the fans of the many bands that took the stage in Montague — it extended to the performers as well. Cliff Cazeau, bassist for the band Lesotho, said that if he could describe the event in one word, it would be “wholesome.”
“I live just south of Boston, and my first foray as an artist was with Promotorhead [Entertainment] and the central and western Mass. music scene, and it’s always been welcoming to me ever since around 2014 and 2015 when I started performing,” Cazeau said. “It’s interesting to see the community grow and peak at this time every year, where everybody sort of converges in one place, and all the homies in a sense get to hang out.”
Lesotho was slotted for the main stage at 5:20 p.m. on Friday, with the band’s introduction advising the crowd to get ready for otherworldly sounds coming from the three-guitar, one-drum band. The band was one of more than 40 that would perform at the Millers Falls Rod & Gun Club, including legendary bands in the heavy metal scene such as High on Fire, which has been performing since 1998.
“If I had not known or were familiar with RPM Fest, I would probably still be here to see them,” Cazeau said, referencing the heavy metal band that was slated to be Saturday’s headliners. “Just seeing that, and being part of the growth, too, being able to cheerlead that and encourage it, there’s a giving and a receiving that I feel here. It’s nice to pay that energy forward into places like Montague.”
Bringing the metal, punk and rock music scene to places like Montague and western Massachusetts as a whole is one of the main goals of The Heavy Culture Cooperative, according to member-owner Emma Zec. The cooperative opened its physical venue in Easthampton in early 2026, hosting musical acts, but it also offers other bar staples such as trivia nights.
Unlike most businesses, where some of the profit from shows put on by the collaborative goes to an owner, the money raised from events “goes straight to the community or the venue,” Zec said. Like RPM Fest, which is run by mostly volunteers, most of the work for the The Heavy Culture Cooperative is done by the member-owners or volunteers who want to grow the metal scene in western Massachusetts.
“You’ll see a lot of the volunteers here and the members of THCC are pretty much [the same],” Zec said. “RPM Fest was pretty much founded by a very similar group of people, where it was like, ‘Hey, we’re all out here, we all love this community, we want to create this thing.'”
That community came out in droves for the first day of RPM Fest on Friday, with some newer attendees experiencing the festival for the first time while others could trace their attendance back to the event’s scaled-down origins in 2014. Andy Beresky recounted how the festival “used to be a backyard party.”
A member of the band Black Pyramid, Beresky said he believes he played in the first two renditions of RPM Fest, and he now returns to the festival each year to see the slate of bands and how much the community has grown.
“It’s just grown and grown,” Beresky said. “For me, the other thing that is kind of exciting is just seeing some of the bands that are on here this year. Having a band like High on Fire who are an international act, who’ve won a Grammy, to come and play here is pretty impressive. But also, you’ve got my friends from Ecstatic Vision, so I get to hang with them.”
While the bands were the main attraction at RPM Fest, outside of the music, there was also cornhole, soccer balls and a tented area where video games, pool and foosball offered a reprieve from the sun, and an opportunity for the youngest metal fans to take a break from the music if need be.
Even though some of the material from the bands may not have been intended for the youngest ears, children made use of the many opportunities for fun around them. This sense of paying it forward and building community was felt throughout the event.
“The community is really important,” Beresky said. “I’ve been all over the world doing music and stuff, but I’ve always really wanted to make sure I keep the roots with folks here.”
Echoing Malone, Cazeau said the event, for lack of a better word, felt like a family reunion.
“It’s a really good energy to feel. It feels wholesome to me,” Cazeau said. “There’s really no other way I could characterize it. If I had to sum it up in one word, it would be wholesome. My heart is full.”
