Emerging from Alabama in 2022, Screams of Desolation operate in the depressive and suicidal black metal tradition — a subgenre defined by its emotional rawness, lo-fi production values, and a willingness to dwell in psychological extremity that most metal won't approach. The Bandcamp URL itself signals their alignment with that scene's specific intensity. There's something fitting about this kind of inward, desolate black metal being born in the Deep South, where isolation takes on its own particular texture.

Named for the Hockomock Swamp — a legendarily haunted stretch of southeastern Massachusetts that Native Americans called a place of evil spirits — Weymouth's Screams of Hockomock have been channeling that unsettling regional folklore into melodic death/black metal since 2018. The swamp's history of mysterious lights, cryptid sightings, and indigenous warning legends makes it an appropriately eerie muse for music that blends melodic death metal's emotional sweep with black metal's atmospheric menace. Local mythology as metal fuel, executed with genuine craft.

Pittsburgh's Scrying Blade emerged in 2020 working in raw and ambient black metal — a pairing that uses minimalist production and sparse, hypnotic repetition to evoke something occult and introspective rather than violent. The project draws on the more meditative, lo-fi wing of the black metal tradition: static-drenched recordings, long atmospheric passages, and a sensibility more aligned with ritual than performance. In Pittsburgh, a city whose industrial weight and grey skies suit this kind of heavy, searching music, they've found natural footing.

Formed in California in 2019, Seas of Winter channels the cold, atmospheric fury of black metal into a solo project that feels both intimate and vast. The project leans into the bleakness the name implies — glacial tremolo lines, suffocating atmosphere, and a rawness that puts sonic texture ahead of accessibility. It's the kind of black metal that rewards patience and solitude.

Los Angeles's Sebek — named for the ancient Egyptian crocodile deity — forge a blackened thrash attack that's as feral and aggressive as their namesake. Active since 2015, the band channels the raw, speed-obsessed chaos of early black/thrash into something that feels genuinely dangerous rather than merely nostalgic. Their LA origins ground them in a city with deep extreme metal roots, and they honor that lineage without sounding derivative.

Fresh out of Huntington Beach, California, Secularis arrived in 2025 as one of the newest entries in the American black/death underground, combining the icy hostility of black metal with the visceral attack of death metal. Even at this early stage, the project signals a willingness to operate in the extremes where both genres converge most violently.

Portland, Oregon black metal project Secundus emerged in 2020 from a city with a quietly deep underground metal tradition, channeling the raw and atmospheric strains of the genre into something with a distinctly Pacific Northwest character. Their Bandcamp presence under the handle secunduspdx marks them as a local fixture for devotees of cold, abrasive sound.

American raw black metal project Seele emerged in 2018 with a sound rooted in the lo-fi, corrosive aesthetic that defines the most uncompromising wing of the genre — the German word for "soul" suggesting a project concerned less with polish than with some deeper, harder-to-articulate extraction. Their location-less existence reinforces the isolationist character that raw black metal has always embraced.

Waco, Texas black metal project Seiobo takes its name from a figure in East Asian mythology and channels that sense of the otherworldly into Texas's growing underground black metal scene since 2023. Operating out of a city not typically associated with the genre, Seiobo represents the kind of geographically unexpected but sonically committed black metal that keeps the genre's underground alive and unpredictable.

Hailing from the rural plains of Farmersville, Texas, Selchidh has been crafting immersive atmospheric black metal since 2015, weaving vast, desolate soundscapes that feel native to the wide open skies of North Texas. Their music favors expansive, textured compositions that trade speed for mood, layering tremolo-driven riffs beneath cold, windswept ambience. They remain one of the quieter but more distinctive voices in the American atmospheric black metal underground.

A relatively new project out of Worcester, Massachusetts, Self Inflicted Gunshot Wounds formed in 2021 and traffic in a raw, uncompromising hybrid of black and death metal that leans heavily on ugliness as an aesthetic virtue. Worcester has a long history of producing abrasive, extreme music, and this project fits that lineage well — dissonant, violent in tone, and deliberately difficult. Their Bandcamp presence suggests a lo-fi approach that favors atmosphere over polish.

A shadowy Midwestern entity that emerged in 2017, Self Slaughter blend black and death metal in the raw, no-frills manner common to the American underground that operates entirely outside of metropolitan scenes. Their deliberately anonymous presentation — no fixed city listed, a no-frills Bandcamp — reflects a project more interested in creating suffocating extreme metal than building a public profile. The combination of black metal's atmospheric menace with death metal's brutality gives their music an especially oppressive quality.

Sempiternal Suffering formed in 2022 and practice raw black metal in the most stripped-down sense — minimal production, relentless atmosphere, and a deliberate rejection of anything approaching comfort or accessibility. The project's name telegraphs its entire aesthetic program: endless, grinding darkness rendered in buzzing, lo-fi black metal that owes more to the Scandinavian second wave's ugliest corners than to any modern polish. Anonymous by design, the music does all the speaking.

A Colorado-based atmospheric black metal project founded in 2022, Senewa works in the expansive, nature-infused tradition of American black metal that draws heavily from the landscapes of the Mountain West. The project's name and approach suggest an interest in indigenous or spiritual dimensions beyond the purely sonic, giving their windswept, tremolo-heavy compositions an added layer of gravity. Their Bandcamp presence marks them as part of a growing wave of contemplative, landscape-driven black metal emerging from the American interior.

Melodic black metal project out of Princeton, Illinois, formed in 2017. Drawing on the atmospheric and melodic strains of Scandinavian black metal, they filter that tradition through an American Midwest isolation that gives the music its own austere character.