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.

San Diego's Empty Gods arrived in 2025 with a black metal vision stripped of ceremony, trading polish for raw nihilistic spite.

Cincinnati's Empty Skull traffic in black metal that feels like late-winter Ohio — bleak, unlit, and without apology, churning out misanthropic hostility since 2013.

San Francisco's Empty Suits channel blackened thrash with a punk backbone, dragging Bay Area aggression through the filth of second-wave black metal since 2019.

Melodic blackened death metal forged out of Sioux Falls, Empty Throne blend glacial atmosphere with visceral extremity — sweeping, dark, and arrived fully-formed in 2021.

Austin's Empyre graft symphonic ambition onto black metal's hostility, a combination that feels at home in a city where experimental extremity is never far from center stage.

Portland's Empyrean Fire entwine symphonic lushness with atmospheric black metal's vastness, building immersive soundscapes that mirror the Pacific Northwest's fog-heavy grandeur.

Lake Forest's Empyrean Throne operate at the intersection of technical black and death metal, deploying precise, labyrinthine riff work that demands close attention from the Southern California underground.

Empyrean Vessel arrived in 2022 as a location-anonymous black metal project, letting the music speak entirely through atmosphere and aggression without geographic context to soften it.