Out of St. Petersburg, Florida, J.J. Hrubovcak channels death metal into a singular seasonal obsession — most notably through the Death Metal Christmas project, pairing the brutality of the genre with holiday themes in earnest, unironic fashion.

Portland, Oregon's Jahai forge a hybrid of melodic death and groove metal that leans hard into rhythmic momentum, their songs balancing the melodic accessibility of the Scandinavian death tradition with a more muscular, body-moving pulse.

Eugene, Oregon's Jean Grey occupy a savage corner of melodic death and deathcore, named after the Marvel character but sonically closer to the chaos of her Phoenix form — technically sharp riffs and deathcore breakdowns wrapped in an unexpected sense of melody.

Minneapolis outfit JHVA formed in 2024 and immediately staked out a dense intersection of industrial, sludge, and death metal — mechanized, abrasive, and heavy enough to feel like the Twin Cities' coldest February manifested as sound.

Mississippi project Jiangshi — named after the hopping Chinese vampiric reanimated corpse — drags brutal death and black metal through a peculiar, occult-adjacent lens, producing music that is as atmospheric as it is annihilating since 2017.

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Job for a Cowboy formed in Glendale, Arizona in 2003 when its founding members were teenagers, initially playing deathcore before pivoting decisively to straight death metal with their Metal Blade debut Genesis (2007). The New York Times described the band's sound as descended from hardcore punk with a guttural, brute-force delivery, and subsequent records pushed further into technical death metal territory before the band went on an extended hiatus.

Stanton, California's Johnny Bee pursues death metal on a decidedly individual basis, a one-person project that has been developing a blunt, unfussy extremity since 2015 without the need for spectacle or scene recognition.

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