Seattle's Vulgaris formed in 2019, drawing on both the city's heavy music heritage and the Pacific Northwest's overcast gloom to craft a sound that moves between doom metal's funeral-paced weight and traditional heavy metal's hooks. The tension between those two poles keeps the material unpredictable.

Barely a year old, Vulnera arose from the rural quiet of Hallstead, Pennsylvania in 2024, pursuing a strain of depressive black metal that leans heavily on atmosphere and desolation. The isolation of small-town northeastern Pennsylvania seems to inform every note of their bleak, introspective sound.

Kansas City's Vulpecula have been operating at the intersection of black and death metal since 2020, weaving ambient textures into their otherwise abrasive framework. The name — a small, faint constellation — hints at a project more interested in negative space and atmosphere than brute force alone.

Omaha's Vulthoom have been practicing raw black metal since 2018, operating far from any established scene with the self-sufficient ferocity that defines the midwest underground. Their output is deliberately primitive — scraping away anything that might soften the freezing, hostile core.

Toledo, Ohio black metal project formed in 2020, invoking Slavic mythological imagery through a raw and atmospheric approach to the genre. The name references Veles, the underworld deity of Slavic paganism, suggesting a thematic focus on death, nature, and ancient spiritual darkness.

Dallas, Texas act blending the caustic filth of crust punk with raw black metal, delivering the kind of lo-fi, abrasive material that draws equally from d-beat and primitive second-wave kvlt aesthetics. Formed in 2023, they represent a scrappy underground presence in the DFW scene.

Oregon black metal project formed in 2025 under a heavily diacritical name that reads as deliberately cryptic and anti-legible — a statement in itself about obscurity and esoteric intent. A brand-new entry in the Pacific Northwest black metal underground, with the aesthetics of a project designed to resist easy categorization or consumption.

Spartanburg, South Carolina band fusing black metal, death metal, and noise into a corrosive, boundary-dissolving sound since 2018. The Vølus name evokes Norse mythological resonance, and the band's blackened death approach carries the dense, suffocating weight that typifies the genre's most extreme convergences.

Warlago emerged from California's Inland Empire in 2021, conjuring black metal that carries the vast, sun-blasted strangeness of the Southern California interior rather than the expected Scandinavian cold. The Inland Empire occupies an odd geographic and cultural position — sprawling, overlooked, and a little unhinged — and Warlago's black metal reflects that dislocation. Raw, atmospheric, and distinctly of its place.

Detroit's Wastelander have been fusing black metal, thrash, and crust punk since 2008 with the post-industrial bleakness that city tends to produce in abundance. Their sound is grimy, propulsive, and absolutely uncompromising — the kind of blackened thrash that draws a straight line from the old Teutonic thrash menace through American hardcore hostility. Detroit gave them everything they needed to make music that sounds like it comes from nowhere else.

San Francisco's Weakling occupy a peculiar position in American black metal — despite forming in 2011 under the name of one of the genre's legendary one-album acts, they carry that city's long tradition of underground weirdness and uncompromising darkness. San Francisco has always hosted black metal that bends in unexpected directions, and Weakling operates in that lineage. Whatever their relationship to the original band's shadow, they carry the name as if they own it.

Denver's Weapönizer have been waging black/thrash war since 2011, bringing the classic Teutonic-style extremity of the form to a city whose altitude seems to sharpen everything into something more dangerous. The umlaut is earned: their music operates in the savage tradition of early Kreator and Sodom filtered through American blackened aggression. Relentless, deliberately raw, and built for maximum hostile impact.

Texas-based Weft formed in 2025, weaving atmospheric folk elements into black metal with an approach that draws on the deep traditions of the natural world rather than the urban metal underground. Their Metal Archives classification as atmospheric folk/black metal signals an interest in texture and landscape over pure extremity. Brand new but already aiming at something larger than the standard black metal template.

Madison, Wisconsin's Weightless have been building progressive post-black metal architecture since 2012, a project shaped by the university city's intellectual restlessness and the Midwest's particular kind of brooding intensity. Their music reaches toward the expansive end of what post-black metal allows — layered, dynamic, attentive to where space and silence do the work that riffs cannot. Genuinely ambitious within a genre that tolerates ambition.

Oregon's Wendigo formed in 2019 drawing on the Pacific Northwest's deep reserves of wilderness mythology and perpetual grey — the Wendigo, a cannibalistic spirit of the forests, is perfect fuel for black metal that wants to feel genuinely cold and ancient. Oregon's forests and coastline have shaped some of the region's most atmospheric metal, and Wendigo taps that well with a sound that feels born in the fog. Raw and elemental, exactly as it should be.