Radfest Plans to Be Houston’s Next, Great Music Festival

The organizers of the all-new music festival dubbed Radfest recognize two glaring needs in Houston’s music scene. We met with them one recent evening at Axelrad Beer Garden and they chatted excitedly about the promise of the event while an experimental jazz band played under a clear, fall night sky in the heart of Midtown.

Their hope is the day-long event featuring 30 bands and slated for Saturday, November 22 will fill some holes and bolster Houston’s music community for years to come. The festival is a partnership between School of Rock and Axelrad, the event’s host. When more than two dozen bands and music lovers descend upon the venue for the festival – which features headliners Daikaiju, Los Skarnales, Swimwear Department and The Final Riot – they think it will be the start of the city’s next great multi-genre music festival.

“You know, we miss Day for Night and having these amazing festivals. Like Free Press (Summerfest) was a thing that I think my entire generation grew up on. And it was something I look back on and miss so deeply because you have locals that are able to play with Interpol and just these bands. It’s something that’s a culture and identity that ACL has for Austin and Houston hasn’t had that for years,” said David Sosa, event coordinator and production manager at Axelrad.

“We don’t have anything like that anymore. And I think we want to build that up because Axelrad is an absolute mecca now of the Houston culture and how many bands we have,” Sosa continued.

To Sosa’s point, nearly every band on the bill has local roots, many of them entwined with School of Rock, the festival’s co-producer. The renowned music education school has more than a dozen Houston-area locations and students and staff from all of them will be participating in Radfest. According to Nicole Starch, general manager at School of Rock Katy and a Radfest organizer, guiding the next generation of Houston musicians into viable and safe music spaces is the two-fold reason for Radfest.

“Luke and I run music schools where we’ve got kids that are graduating and going into the Houston music scene. Post-Me Too, post-COVID, a lot of festivals shut down, a lot of bars that played live music shut down, and we wanted to cultivate relationships with the local scene, build the local scene for the local musicians, but also create a space for our kids to be able to graduate and go into the music scene in a safe way, into the kind of places that we hoped that they would play at, not the icky places,” Starch said.

“For me, personally, the first place I thought of when we started saying where should we do this? You know, me and Nicole were talking. I said, Axelrad’s the place. Axelrad is absolutely the place,” said Luke Shiflet, general manager of School of Rock Kingwood. “There’s a sense of community here. There’s a sense of the culture is amazing, where it’s located, the people that work here, the way you feel when you’re here. You know, I’ve played here and I love this place. And so, to me, there was no better place to start this.”

“Well, we love hearing this from musicians and booking people and, you know, people that like music and the community. Because that’s why we created it. I mean, it means the world to us that others would say that about this space,” said Monte Large, one of Axelrad’s founding partners. “I love music, live music. I feel the same way about Houston, about, you know, losing these gems like Free Press Summerfest, and all these different music festivals. And we wanted to slowly build a community space that was able to house a lot of that stuff.”

Large grew up in Houston and recalled long-gone establishments like The Silver Slipper and Fifth Ward’s Zydeco Ballroom. He said Axelrad was built with those venues in mind and, over more than a decade, has steadily grown to three stages, including one installed just this year. He sees Radfest as a chance to keep growing Axelrad’s legacy.

Whitney Grant is the general manager at Axelrad and she said folks coming from all over to the fest are going to catch the venue’s vibe pretty quickly, the things that put the “Rad” in Radfest.

“That’s something I’ve been really proud of, especially as a new parent, too. I can bring my kid up here and relax and have a good time,” Grant said. “Getting new people out here to check it out and, I mean, the events we’ve had with School of Rock in the past have been so cool. Just such an experience to see the kids play, all the parents having a good time. It’s the best, so I’m really excited about this.”

Tom Guth is music director at School of Rock Kingwood and is also a longtime musician who played the very festivals the entire table had been discussing during our chat.

“It’s really cool to see something like this forming and happening because it’s going to help us as instructors at School of Rock to get these kids, point them in the right direction, have them playing festivals and playing packed places,” Guth said. “I feel like, if you’re a musician, everyone’s played the show to four people and the guy yells ‘Free Bird!’ so you don’t want that for them, especially when you can see how talented they are. You want to see them succeed. You want to see them play to packed venues. And that’s why, you know, when Nicole and Luke mentioned that it was going to be at Axelrad, I was super excited because there’s a community here. It’s fun. It’s awesome. You know, everything about this place is just really good.”

“Several of the bands that are on the lineup are actually former students that are now in the scene that are performing,” Starch said, and Shiflet added, “You know, it’s funny. I started thinking about some of the great Houston bands in our time right now. And I was like, you know, if we run out of bands that are represented within our Schools of Rock, I’m going to reach out to these bands. 

“As I started to reach out, I started to realize, wait, all these bands do work at a School of Rock,” Shiflet continued. “So all 30 of these bands that we’ve curated, you know, outside of the headliners, and even the headliners, have something to do with the School of Rock. School of Rock is right now creating musicians who are going to be festival headliners the years down the way and be local headliners and phenomenal talent already.”

That’s important to Sosa, giving locals a chance to lineup with big, touring acts.

“I mean, it’s kind of insane how many locals there are and how these festivals in bigger venues  that will not be named in Houston do not put on locals with these bigger bands, and it suffocates the local music scene, since they’re not able to play with these people who come from outside of the loop, who are not involved in a DIY music scene, or not know the actual bands, it’s completely just lost on the community,” Sosa said.

“I think we’re trying to turn that around, and then bring something back that is accessible by local bands. You don’t have to be popular like in Austin, and know the right person. It’s like, if you’re just playing around in Houston and you do your job, you can potentially play this festival and we want to grow it annually.”

Shiflet is a triple threat, not just a music educator, but also a musician, whose band, Margins, is playing the fest. And, he is a show promoter via Gulf Coast Booking.  He thinks the festival can shine the sort of light on Houston that will be a beacon for touring bands that sometimes skip the city.

“There’s a phrase we keep coming back to, and it’s we wanna put Houston back on the map,” said Shiflet, who is so excited about the festival’s possibilities he’s hoping it will one day necessitate street closures like the old school fests. He’s even got a dream headliner for 2026 – anyone reading this, he says, please forward it along to Khruangbin.

“I think this is one for the culture. This is one for the heart of Houston. This is going to put Houston back on the map. We’re already seeing people that are so excited. We have some viral TikToks and viral posts where people are like, they’re yearning. They’re yearning to see, again, Houston back on the map and to be a part of the festival culture here in Houston.”

Radfest, Saturday, November 22 at Axelrad Beer Garden, 1517 Alabama. The event features 30-plus bands, including headliners Daikaiju and Los Skarnales, and house bands from Houston’s School of Rock locations. $24.54 and up, doors at noon for this all-ages, new Houston music festival.

This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.

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