Mankato, Minnesota's Human Bashing have been delivering brutal death metal with unambiguous intent since 2014. Technically punishing and lyrically unsparing, they lean into the genre's most extreme traditions with earnest conviction.

Virginia's Human Corpse Abuse arrived in 2022 as a death-grind outfit with a name designed to offend and music calibrated to match — short blasts of putrid brutality with no decorative ambitions whatsoever.

Fresh out of Chicago in 2025, Human Disgust bring a city-worn contempt to straightforward death metal with the kind of focused venom that only a scene as competitive as Chicago can produce. Early and already mean.

New York's Humanity Falls have been dissecting death metal and grindcore through an experimental lens since 2009, treating tempo, structure, and brutality as variables rather than constants. Technical, disorienting, and genuinely unsettling.

New York's Hung take the melodic and progressive side of death metal seriously, building dense, shifting compositions since 2014 that reward repeated listens. Technically ambitious without losing sight of the riff.

From Chinle, Arizona — deep in Navajo Nation — Hunters Moon bring melodic death metal rooted in striking geographic and cultural context since 2021. Their music carries the sweep of canyon country: expansive, powerful, and shot through with natural darkness.

Kansas City's Hypaethral arrived in 2023 with the surgical precision of technical death metal already fully formed, weaving intricate fretwork and chaotic structure into something that sounds both calculated and utterly unhinged. A young band with immediate teeth.

Devastating Melodic Death Metal from Fort Worth.

Castle Rock, Colorado's Hämärä — Finnish for "twilight" or "dim" — bring a brooding intensity to their metalcore that earns the name. Formed in 2019, they craft emotionally charged, hard-hitting songs that sit in that uncomfortable space between light and dark.