YOUNGSTOWN — The Monolith will start emitting again in 2026.

Emissions from the Monolith, a music festival that attracted bands and fans from around the world to Youngstown from 2000 to 2006, will return to Youngstown for four days from Oct. 8 to 11, 2026, at Westside Bowl.

Westside Bowl owners Nate and Jami Offerdahl will partner with Greg Barratt, who started the festival when he owned the former Youngstown music venue Nyabinghi, which hosted the festival.

Emissions catered to fans of doom metal, stoner rock, sludge metal and adjacent sounds. Those genres don’t dominate pop culture, but they have loyal fan bases, and Nyabinghi veterans like Clutch and Mastodon now headline mid-sized venues and appear on the bills of major music festivals worldwide. Mastodon played the Covelli Centre with Ghost in 2022 and co-headlined a show with Coheed and Cambria at Youngstown Foundation Amphitheatre in June.

“It was kind of a family thing,” Barratt said. “A lot of people still talk to each other that met at that festival 20 years ago. People got married that met at that festival. It was just a community of like-minded people, and it was just the right place at the right time.”

Bringing back Emissions is something Nate Offerdahl has wanted to do for a while. He attended several of the festivals, and his business benefited from the musical audience that venues like Nyabinghi, Cedars Lounge, Penguin Pub and Pyatt Street Down Under cultivated.

“There’s a very fertile ground for live music here in Youngstown, especially the louder rock ‘n’ roll variety, and that’s due in no small part to all the work they did,” Offerdahl said.

It became more than just an idea after Offerdahl went to RippleFest in Austin, Texas, which was the site of the final Emissions from the Monolith in 2007.

“The folks at the festival, when they found out we were all from Youngstown, they all knew about Nyabinghi, they all knew about Emissions from the Monolith,” Offerdahl said. “Being in Austin around that festival and watching how it was run and really enjoying myself, it got me really thinking about it.”

He reached out to Barratt, who didn’t need much encouragement.

“I had considered it for a couple years and had never figured out a venue to do it at,” Barratt said. “He kind of lit the fire under (me) to get it going.”

They picked the date to give themselves enough time to organize the event and also because it will fall on Columbus Day weekend. That will give those coming from out of town an extra travel day with the national holiday.

And they expect many travelers.

“At its peak, we had fly-ins from Europe, we had fly-ins from all over the country,” Barratt said.

When Barratt started booking the festival, he was bringing in every act that was available in those relatively new genres. For the 2026 edition, Barratt expects a mix of past Nyabinghi performers, newer bands that have emerged in the two decades that the festival has been dormant and some reunions of bands that haven’t played together for years.

Offerdahl said they’re trying to bring in some of the bigger names from the past — “We’re definitely punching above our weight class.”

It’s too early to say when the lineup will be announced, although Barrratt said he would prefer to announce the whole lineup at once instead of trickling out who’s playing one by one.

They’re still discussing ticket costs, on-sale dates and the number of tickets that will be sold. Offerdahl said the goal was to create an enjoyable experience rather than trying to squeeze in as many folks as possible.

“There’s going to be people coming here from all over the country, probably some from outside the country,” Offerdahl said. “They’re going to be here for four days. What we don’t want is them to be jammed in here like sardines. The average age of the concertgoer for this particular event is going to be 35 to 54. It might even skew slightly older than that. And those folks are going to want to be comfortable, right? They’re not going to enjoy being in a full-capacity crowd for four straight days, so we want to have some extra space. We want to have space for vendors. We want it to be as comfortable an environment as possible.”