Portland, Oregon's Rotting Sky has spent over a decade building suffocating soundscapes where funeral doom's glacial pace meets the bleak atmospherics of black metal and ambient drone. Their music is slow, cavernous, and oppressive — less concerned with riffs than with the weight of sustained decay.

Texas act Rougarou, formed in 2024, takes their name from the Cajun werewolf legend and channels it into raw black metal laced with folk elements — an unsettling mix that roots their sound in regional myth and primitive riffing. It's an early but sharp-edged project with a distinctly American folkloric slant.

Relentless Black Metal out of Texas.

New Jersey's Ruins have been grinding out heavy, fuzz-saturated stoner metal since 2001, drawing on the genre's psychedelic and blues-soaked roots with a sound built for low-end punishment.

Frigid Melodic Death / Black Metal from Dallas.

Rêx Mündi is an American black metal project operating since 2011, drawing on the rawness and esoteric atmosphere that define the genre's underground tradition, with an identity rooted more in concept than geography.

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.