San Antonio's Sacrificial Possession arrived in 2023 with a black/death metal sound rooted in hostility and ritual darkness — the kind of band that treats genre conventions as a launchpad rather than a ceiling. Their approach fuses the savagery of death metal's low-end brutality with the icy tremolo malevolence of black metal, carving out a uniquely Texan corner of the underground.

Michigan's Sacrificial Rite works in the corrosive tradition of raw black metal and noise, producing recordings that feel less like performances than transmissions from somewhere deeply hostile. Formed in 2020, the project also ventures into dungeon synth, creating a tension between freezing lo-fi aggression and solitary, meditative ambience.

California's Sadisme has operated since 2018 in the unforgiving terrain of raw black metal, building a catalog defined by primitive production and an unwillingness to soften any edge. The project strips the genre down to its most confrontational elements — hissing tape noise, venomous riffs, and an atmosphere of pure contempt.

Raw blackened speed metal channeling Motorhead and Judas Priest through an extreme metal lens. 'Midnight Assassin' is a nine-track ode to serial killers.

Filthy Depressive / Post-Black Metal from Oak Park, Illinois (early); Texas (mid); Baltimore, Maryland (later).

Denver's Saeva occupy a distinctive space in the Rocky Mountain metal underground, blending post-black metal's expansive atmospherics with progressive architecture and genuine black metal menace since 2019. Their music breathes at altitude — sprawling, searching, and capable of pivoting from crystalline ambience into punishing darkness within a single track.

Nashville's Saidan — a city better known for country than black metal — have been carving out their own frozen niche since 2020, bringing a sense of Southern isolation to a genre built on Scandinavian desolation. Their black metal finds unexpected common ground between the bleakness of Appalachian remoteness and the cold fury of the second wave.

New York's Samoubiystvo — the name translating roughly to "suicide" in Russian — operates in the depressive black metal underground since 2024 with the solitary intensity the subgenre demands. The project works in darkness by design, crafting music that feels internal and desolate, built from raw black metal's most harrowing emotional register.

Denver's Sanguin Blodmoon are among the newest arrivals in Colorado's thriving black metal underground, formed in 2025 with a sound rooted in the raw, hostile fundamentals of the genre. Their name — blending Latin and Old Norse blood-moon imagery — signals a project interested in darkness as both aesthetic and practice.

Minnesota's Sanguivore have been forging blackened sludge and doom since 2019 in the tradition of bands that take the genre's bleakest impulses from both directions — the cold aggression of black metal and the suffocating weight of sludge/doom — and compress them into something genuinely oppressive. The upper Midwest winter lives in their sound.

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Salt Lake City's Sardoniscorn have been conducting black metal from one of America's most incongruous cities for that genre since 2013 — the mountain geography notwithstanding, Utah's metal underground has always punched well above its weight. Their sound carries the isolation that defines much of the Great Basin, translated into cold, abrasive black metal.

Lawrence, Kansas's Sarkatha arrived in 2023 with a speed/thrash/black metal hybrid that pulls the Great Plains' wide-open emptiness into genuinely ferocious music. They operate in a college town with a surprisingly deep underground tradition, channeling that energy into a sound that refuses to pick just one lane between black metal's cold fury and thrash's kinetic aggression.

Austin's Sarpa have been pursuing black/death metal since 2020, bringing the Texas capital's increasingly dense extreme metal underground another entry in the serpentine tradition the band's name invokes. Their sound moves with the coiled aggression of the subgenre's finest work — death metal's weight carrying the black metal's atmosphere rather than the other way around.

Los Angeles's Satani Infernalis have operated in the raw black metal underground since 2016, a project that deliberately resists the city's association with polished production in favor of primitive, corroded sound design. Their music treats lo-fi aesthetics as an ideological position — raw black metal as it was always meant to be heard, unmediated and contemptuous of commercial refinement.