Venomous Black Metal from Dallas.

Redwood City, California's Disruption emerged in 2022 as part of a new wave of West Coast black metal practitioners, carving their niche from the Bay Area's fertile underground. Young but focused, they approach the genre with the cold, abrasive conviction that black metal demands, drawing on Northern California's increasingly active extreme metal scene.

Baltimore's Distend emerged in 2020 at the intersection of black metal's raw hostility and post-black metal's atmospheric expansiveness, channeling the grit and mood of a city with a serious underground pedigree. Their post-black metal lean brings texture and space to the tremolo-and-blast template, a natural fit for a scene that's never been shy about pushing at genre boundaries.

Santa Fe, New Mexico's Distorted Evil fuse black metal's cold fury with thrash metal's driving aggression, a blackened thrash approach that suits the high desert isolation their hometown provides. Formed in 2022, they've leaned into the raw, rehearsal-tape energy that makes the subgenre's best material feel genuinely dangerous rather than polished into submission.

San Diego's DitchWitch have been dealing in raw black metal and noise since 2018, embracing the lo-fi, corrosive aesthetic that puts atmosphere and hostility above production clarity. In a city known for its more polished metal output, DitchWitch carve out a genuinely abrasive corner — primitive, unrelenting, and indifferent to comfort.

Roseville, Michigan's Divinationist emerged in 2020 fusing black metal's bleakness with death metal's carnality, inhabiting the fertile no-man's-land where both genres' most uncompromising qualities amplify each other. Michigan's extreme metal underground has long produced bands willing to work this territory, and Divinationist continue that lineage.

Colorado Springs' Divine Hubris have been pursuing an uncompromising black metal vision since 2021, drawing creative energy from the high altitude and arid bleakness of one of Colorado's most culturally idiosyncratic cities. Their name suggests a kind of defiant grandeur, and their black metal reflects that tension between ambition and nihilism.

Houston black metal. Albums include Saeculum Obscura and Aeon Cosmic Death.

Blasphemous Black Metal from Laredo.

Dolore Affectus — Latin for "pain" and "suffering" — is a US black metal project that emerged in 2020 with a name that lays its aesthetic philosophy bare from the outset. Rooted in the rawer, more introspective traditions of the genre, the project leans into the emotional devastation that the best black metal weaponizes. Their anonymity and lack of fixed location only adds to the isolationist mystique central to their craft.

Alhambra, California's Dominion have been carving out their corner of the West Coast death metal underground since 2016, trading in the kind of punishing, technically-minded brutality Southern California has long incubated. The band's Bandcamp presence under the "ashen" moniker hints at a sound steeped in ash-and-ruin imagery befitting the genre's bleakest tendencies. They represent the current generation of LA-area death metal acts keeping the flame burning in the shadow of the genre's old guard.

Formed in Birmingham in 2018, Domnitor work the volatile intersection of death and black metal, a fusion that produces something uglier and more unpredictable than either genre alone. Their Bandcamp handle — "domnitorulrau," Romanian for "the evil ruler" — suggests a fascination with Eastern European black metal mythology and historical darkness. The blending of death metal's blunt physicality with black metal's atmospheric savagery gives their sound a distinctly volatile edge.

A brand-new entry from Kansas City, Missouri, Don Tvsk formed in 2025 at the intersection of black metal's cold fury and doom's crushing torpor. The pairing is a natural one — both genres traffic in despair, just at different tempos — and Kansas City's underrated extreme metal community provides a fitting home for such an uncompromising project. With their ink barely dry, they are among the most recently formed black/doom acts in the current American underground.

Seattle's DoomHawk have been one of the Pacific Northwest's most eclectic extreme metal acts since 2007, weaving folk instrumentation through the twin brutalities of death and black metal to conjure something genuinely strange and ancient-feeling. Their long tenure in Seattle's heavy underground spans nearly two decades, giving them a maturity and stylistic range few local contemporaries can match. The folk elements add an earthy, pagan quality that cuts against the genre's more urban and industrial impulses.

Florida's DoomWake weaves together depressive black metal and funeral doom into a sound that feels like watching something beautiful rot in the subtropical heat — slow, suffocating, and shot through with cold tremolo melody. Active since 2017, the project operates at the intersection of hopelessness and atmospherics that defines the DSBM tradition, though their doom metal undercurrent adds a physical weight that purely black metal acts often lack. It's music that lingers long after it ends, like a fever that won't break.