Milwaukee's Emblazoned have been scorching through black and death metal territory since 2005, bringing a Midwestern directness to a style rooted in European darkness. Their approach is uncompromising and dense, built for the underground rather than the mainstream.

Richmond's Embra have been conjuring raw, unadorned black metal from the Virginia underground since 2016. There's a cold atmospheric quality to their work that speaks to the Old Dominion's capacity for isolation and darkness.

Southern California's Embrace the Noose craft depressive black metal built around despair as texture, using harsh production and agonized vocals to evoke psychological isolation. Formed in 2018, they bring the DSBM tradition's bleakest impulses to the California underground.

New York's Embracing Carpathian Mourning draw on Eastern European black metal's epic and foreboding qualities, channeling the Carpathian mystique through an American underground lens. Active since 2022, they pursue a distinctly atmospheric and mythological strain of the style.

San Francisco's Embrium thread post-black metal's expansive, textural qualities through shoegaze's luminous dissonance, arriving at something genuinely atmospheric. Founded in 2021, the band belongs to a current wave of Bay Area artists pushing black metal into introspective and sonically immersive territory.

Chicago's EMK have been at it since 2021, pursuing black metal's most uncompromising strains from within the Midwest's sprawling underground — cold, direct, and indifferent to polish.

Des Moines black metal act Empire have been working in the shadows since 2011, pursuing the genre's most raw and elemental qualities from the middle of a Midwest that rarely gets credit for its underground extremity.

Lansing's Empire Auriga occupy a precise and distinctive corner of the metal map, fusing black metal's atmospheric hostility with industrial texture and ambient structure in a way that has made them one of Michigan's more singular exports.

Lakeland's Empty pursue melodic death metal with clean Floridian ferocity, threading grief-soaked harmonies through tight, technically precise riffing since 2020.