Ferocious Speed / Thrash Metal from Houston.

Portland's Master Burial conjures suffocating walls of raw, atmospheric black metal soaked in despair and Pacific Northwest bleakness. Formed in 2021, the project channels depressive DSBM traditions through a lo-fi haze that feels genuinely harrowing.

Named after Southeast Asian folklore's restless spirits, Chicago's Matianak channels that dread into cold, menacing black metal. Their work since 2016 carries the dense urban edge of the Midwest filtered through an icy, unrelenting aesthetic.

Lakewood, New Jersey's Maximum Oversatan runs at full throttle, fusing black metal savagery with the raw punch of speed metal for something that never lets up. Since 2011, they've kept the spirit of the unholy metal hordes alive on the Jersey Shore.

Springfield, Massachusetts's Maze of Maze carves through the space between black and death metal with a relentless, disorienting intensity. Since 2017, they've built a sound that feels as claustrophobic as their name suggests.

Rising out of Clinton Township, Michigan in 2023, MDCLXV — a name rendered in Roman numerals — channels the cold, suffocating atmosphere of second-wave black metal into a distinctly modern American framework. Still early in their existence, they carry the intensity of a project with something to prove.

Los Angeles-based Me Igi traffics in raw black metal stripped down to its most abrasive essentials, formed in 2021 against the grain of the city's sunlit reputation. Their material is lo-fi and confrontational, drawing from the primitive necro tradition while filtering it through a Southern California isolation.

Portland, Maine's Megog have been conjuring cold Atlantic black metal since 2017, pulling the elemental severity of their New England coastline into recordings that feel raw and ritualistically bleak. Their approach favors atmosphere and hostility over polish, embracing the genre's most uncompromising conventions.

New Orleans black metal act Mehenet carry the distinctive atmosphere of their city — its rot, its heat, its occult undercurrent — into a sound that's been developing since 2018. Unlike the city's dominant doom and sludge tradition, Mehenet channels that darkness through the tremolo-drenched, ceremonial intensity of pure black metal.