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.

Pessimist is an American blackened death metal band originating in Baltimore, Maryland in 1989, delivering a relentless fusion of death metal aggression and black metal atmosphere across three studio albums. Signing to Lost Disciple Records in 1997, the band released Cult of the Initiated (1997) and Blood for the Gods (1999), both of which charted on CMJ's Loud Rock Top 40, followed by Slaughtering the Faithful (2001). The band has been intermittently active since and is signed to Season of Mist, with a new album titled Keys to the Underworld in development.

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.

Pittsburgh's Plague Witch arrived in 2020 with a melodic black/death metal sound that balances scorching ferocity with sharp, memorable songcraft — dark and relentless without sacrificing hooks.

San Diego's Plaguelands operates in the melancholy borderlands of depressive and post-black metal — sprawling, introspective compositions that find beauty and desolation wound together like smoke.