At Fire in the Mountains, the songs and performances came second to music’s intrinsic, often-praised healing, community-building, and coping qualities. One of the many MC’s at the festival, which took place from July 23-36 at the Red Eagle Campground in Montana, summarized it like this, “They say metal is dark. They’re right.” Sadly, I can’t recall if it was Charlie Speicher or Robert Hall, but they dove into how metal confronts, and enmeshes itself in, mental health, so of course, a metal festival would be the ideal lens through which to address suicide prevention within indigenous communities. Fire in the Mountains was as much about cultural exchange and exploration as it was about how metal, through engaging with dark themes, offers survival and a path to flourishing.
Breaking down the entire Fire in the Mountains roster and their performances is not an adequate reflection because the critique is self-answering. Would you want to see Enslaved live? Then you should see them if they play a festival; you don’t need me to confirm or deny your suspicions about whether they’re good live.
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As a whole, the line-up was appropriate for Fire in the Mountain’s message and aesthetics. Wayfarer personified the festival’s American identity reckoning with itself and black metal (to extend that thought further, 16 Horsepower grappled with rock music’s American and Appalachian roots), Neurosis proved that things do get better and that recovery is possible, Enslaved and Borknagar explored their heritage through (black) metal in a way that wasn’t tainted with hatred, and Nocturne and Yaotl Mictlan explored black metal through their own cultures. Oddly, Phobophilic felt the most out of place in that they were the only straight-up death metal band amongst a bill of genre-melding artists. Still, they tore the house down.
For those on and off the stage, metal connected them to minds, ideas, locations, and stories that would’ve been locked behind silence. Metal music opened doors to worlds we cannot explore ourselves, but can understand through relation. That was the Firekeeper Alliance’s (a non-profit that serves the Blackfeet Nation community) plan to address suicide, after all–by giving young people something to live for and to show them how they can be a part of it. Many of the local youth took them up on that offer by entering moshpits, crowdsurfing, performing with their student bands, watching their elders hold positions of authority and collaboration with festival organizers, and leading their own panels. The young folks, those usually seen as most at risk, were treated with the promise that they would find a reason to prosper, just like many at the festival had.
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Distilling Fire in the Mountains to its core reveals the mantra “Suicide is not an option.” The Blackfeet Nation members repeated it throughout the weekend, and never let it settle into a slogan alone. Through working with the Firekeeper Alliance, the Blackfeet tribe used Fire in the Mountains as a fundraising event for suicide prevention and intervention programs. Those long-reaching endeavors aim to support those in need long after the festival concluded, while the weekend itself displayed numerous brighter roads that lay ahead. Suicide cannot be an option when there were multiple paths into music and community.
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Seeing as how the Blackfeet Nation hosted the festival, they provided multiple avenues through which attendees could learn about them. These included an opening pow wow with a speech by Pikuni Crazy Dog Society leader Larry Grounds. At Fire in the Mountains, culture was respected and shared. The Blackfeet tribe welcomed festival attendees to participate in certain dances and, later, Wayfarer called up members of the Heavy Music Symposium to join them on-stage for “Animal Crown.” The symposium, from the Fire Keepers Alliance website, is “a high school course which celebrates heavy music and its healing properties.” A group of teens, battle vested and dusty from the mosh pit, arrived on-stage and waved the Blackfeet nation flag, celebrating heavy metal and creating new strides through it. Ironically, they did so as if to disprove the lyrics of Wayfarer’s “Enter my House Justified”–”Oh lonesome rider, lay down your guns/ This world has left you behind, time has won.”
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One could also engage with the Blackfeet Nation through numerous workshops, including discussions about tribal sovereignty, animism, and missing and murdered indigenous persons, as well as a lodge raising demonstration. These workshops were hour-long panels with a moderator and keynote speakers based right beside the lake, and they colored Fire in the Mountains as an educational experience as much as a musical one. The best panels combined both. One featured discussions from Bandcamp, Profound Lore, and Vesperian about how labels navigated the digital music distribution landscape, while another highlight was Andy Patterson (of Subrosa) and Enslaved’s Iver Sandøy conversation about recording, mixing, and mastering.
What these workshops provided that the concerts couldn’t, by their nature as loud rock performances, was a space to meditate on how metal interacts with ecosystems outside music. If the concerts were outsized outpourings of energy and emotion, the workshops were left-side-of-the-brain affairs, processing those outbursts and how they strengthen our ties to land, people, and our self. They accomplished this without demanding that we think about it, but offering several avenues to examine metal music. From there, the mind did the rest.
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Fire in the Mountains was also the first festival where I felt like a guest. At every festival, attendees are technically guests, but we are catered to as consumers. We are trade operatives, investments by the organizers that will circulate more funds back into the festival. Of course that was true at Fire in the Mountains since I brought and spent money, though there was a subliminal badge pinned on everyone’s chest that we were there transiently for something deeper. We were there to learn as much as were we to revel in the gift that is Glacier National Park. Mountain peaks and summits obscured the horizon and anything outside of the festival.
As guests, we were treated to music, intellectually-engaging workshops, and an idyllic setting for American black metal fans. The woods and water were right by the stages, so it was possible to cool off in-between sets. I say “American black metal fans” because the Fire in the Mountains setting, boreal and dusty, matched that which informed many great USBM records, not the frosty Scandinavian woods or the rugged mountains of the Mediterranean. Ashes Against the Grain, when Agalloch performed it, felt like it rose directly from the festival grounds and proliferated through the Portland group. Likewise, you’d blow out a data center getting ChatGPT to come up with a more mis-en-scene performance than “Spirit Helper,” Enslaved’s collaboration with Kevin Kicking Woman, a representative of the Blackfeet Nation. All the natural splendor thankfully boxed out reliable cell phone signals and forced further introspection and community relations to the benefit of everyone attending. Not having a cell phone for an entire weekend was worth the price of admission alone.
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Beyond the large teepees and acrylic orange sunsets, the festival’s beauty was how kind everybody was. Maybe only nice people are willing to cross multiple state lines and drive into a national park to hear extreme metal. Maybe, being a dry festival actually did make everybody kinder. That’s definitely a possibility, as was the large number of families attending with some newborns hearing their first live show before they developed object permanence. Whatever it was, Dylan Walker from Full of Hell put it best during his panel on extreme metal vocals: “Empathy is the going language.” Competition, resentment, jealousy, and spite dissipated upon entering Fire in the Mountains.
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With all this being said, the festival has room to improve. None of the following criticisms are enough to prevent me from attending next year. They’re just the easiest and largest holes to fill. Firstly, no coffee being available after 1:00 pm is a punishment for a crime I didn’t commit. Beneath the scorching sun, without shade or clouds and a late start, I’d happily spend my budget on cold brew. On that note, shade was in short supply in the performance bowl, with only the two bars (both non-alcoholic) providing adequate coverage, and one was VIP-exclusive. Throw in another bar, a place to eat, a vape hotspot
, whatever, just more coverage from the oppressive heat. I didn’t hear any accounts of heat stroke and nearly all attendees were wise enough to protect themselves from the sun, except the dumbass who stood for hours on end with his shirt off in 35°C weather and drank a 32-ounce Blue Raspberry sugar-free Red Bull brew at 9:00 pm because “it was colder than water.”
The barbeque is my largest gripe. It was $35USD daily. You were only granted one meal per day. I expected small portion sizes from the other vendors, but the servings doled out by the BBQ were meagre. I felt like an asshole asking for more, and I only ate the vegan availabilities, meaning I got much less than everyone else. There was only one dedicated vegan protein, a plant-based sausage, served on a single day. Most of the days, the vegan options were just a plate of the same sides and veggies everyone got minus the meat. Please, in the future salt the food or have a vegan-friendly sauce. Had the BBQ ticket covered the entire weekend then I’d be fine, but as it stands, it’s the one piece I’m skipping next year.
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But unsalted food, mild heat stroke, and caffeine deprivation are inherent to music festivals. Those gripes, like a sunburn, will fade and turn pale. What won’t is the mental image of no less than 10 people running to help someone who fell off their mobility aid outside sun-ripened porta potties, or a cult of caffeine that assembled every morning and gave coffee to anyone on the promise that they also sample the free jam, or the local indigenous high school students and their zine which they distributed at the festival, or the mosh pit entirely composed of security guards who were actively on duty. What won’t fade is a message that I may not need now, but sorely needed years ago; why living is a selfless task that gives back to your community, because we make ourselves islands if we do not learn the weather and climate of those around us.
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