Rhode Island's P.V.D. keeps raw black metal stripped to its most caustic and primitive essentials, with no polish and no compromise. The project's name doubles as a hat-tip to the Providence punk underground from which it emerged in 2019.

Out of coastal Wilmington, North Carolina, Paagtheaan conjures black metal with a cold, isolated atmosphere that suits a port city sitting at the edge of the Atlantic. Active since 2017, the project channels traditional second-wave fury into something distinctly American.

Emerging from Portland, Maine in 2022, Pain Descendant craft black metal with the bleakness of the North Atlantic winter baked into every riff. Harsh and uncompromising, the band draws on raw second-wave tradition without softening any of its edges.

Oakland's Palace of Worms began as raw black metal and evolved over the years into something far more grotesque — a churning death-doom force that sounds like the Bay Area underground rotting from within. Since 2007, the band has been one of the West Coast's most singular and unsettling metal acts.

One of Arkansas's longest-running black metal acts, Fayetteville's Palantir have been keeping a cold flame burning since 1994. Their longevity speaks to an uncompromising dedication to the genre's most austere and atmospheric traditions.

Founding fathers of extreme metal in the Rio Grande Valley. Death/black metal since 1988.

Long Beach's Pantheon forge black and death metal into a single violent hybrid, channeling the dense, abrasive energy of the Southern California underground since 2011. Their sound sits at the dark intersection where melodic hostility meets outright savagery.

Scorching Experimental Black Metal (early); Post-Rock (later) from Grand Prairie.

Parasiticide wage total sonic war across black metal, death metal, and grindcore, letting the three styles collide without quarter. Formed in 2020, the band's location-free status suggests a project more concerned with extremity than geography.

Born in the Silicon Valley underground in 2020, Patala weaves symphonic grandeur and gothic atmosphere through a black metal framework, conjuring something ornate and sinister in equal measure.

Taking their name from Victorian horror literature, Penny Dreadful fuses black metal's frozen menace with the suffocating weight of doom, conjuring an atmosphere as grim as it is hypnotic.

Minneapolis's Pestifere draws from the Twin Cities' rich extreme metal tradition, blending Scandinavian melodic death metal architecture with blasting black metal ferocity.

Blackened death metal horde featuring former members of Thornspawn, Hod, and Burial Shroud. Filthy, bestial sound in the vein of Blasphemy and Necrovore.

Named for the southern constellation that swallows the river Eridanus, Tupelo, Mississippi's Piscis Austrinus pours raw, unadorned black metal into the deep American South — a strange and fitting vessel.

Syracuse's Plague Mask has been cultivating a blackened doom sludge pestilence since 2012 — slow, harrowing, and suffused with the kind of upstate New York despair that only January in that city can produce.