This Pennsylvania Voidwalker operates in the slow, funereal intersection of doom and death metal — music that moves like cold tar and carries the same melancholic weight as the best work in that tradition. Formed in 2020, their doom/death approach leans into desolation rather than pure heaviness, using the death metal elements to add menace to the grief rather than overwhelm it. A different project sharing a name with their Madison counterparts, but operating in a fully distinct emotional register.

Chicago's Voimaton — the Finnish word for "powerless" or "exhausted" — have been dragging the death/doom template through Midwestern gloom since 2019, their name telegraphing exactly the emotional terrain they work. The death metal elements provide structural heaviness while the doom underpinning slows everything to a dirge-like crawl, creating music that feels genuinely burdened. In a city with a strong experimental metal history, they occupy the darker end of its underground with conviction.

Louisville's Volcandra have been building a melodic black/death metal sound since 2020 that takes the genre's twin pillars seriously — the melody isn't softening the death metal, and the death metal isn't there just to add credibility to the melody. Their sound pulls from Scandinavian melodic black metal's ear for harmony while keeping the death metal attack ferocious enough to matter. One of the more capable melodic extreme metal acts to come out of the American South.

Volharding — Dutch for "perseverance" — have been grinding out death metal from Toms River, New Jersey since 2014, the name suggesting a certain dogged, unfashionable commitment to the form. Their sound sits in the old-school death metal tradition: heavy, direct, more interested in impact than atmosphere, and suspicious of anything that might be called progressive. New Jersey's got underrated metal roots and Volharding fit comfortably in that rough-edged lineage.

Sacramento's Volrahven have been playing thrash/death metal since 2020, combining the Bay Area thrash tradition in their geographic vicinity with the more vicious end of death metal to produce something meaner than pure thrash and more riff-centered than pure death. California has an obvious claim on both genres and Volrahven work like a band that knows the history and wants to operate in the space between the two rather than settling for either. Four years in, the Sacramento underground has found a reliable representative.

Out of Greenville, South Carolina, Volvulus have spent over a decade crafting some of the ugliest, most punishing slam death metal the Southeast has to offer. Since forming in 2010 they've refined a sound built on cavernous, bowel-shaking breakdowns and the kind of surgical brutality that defines the genre's most dedicated practitioners.

Detroit's Vomiphilia rose from the city's already abrasive underground in 2021, fusing death metal's grotesque anatomy with goregrind's fixation on bodily horror. Their music lands with the blunt force of a city that has never had much patience for subtlety — raw, disgusting, and thoroughly committed to extremity.

Vomit Forth formed in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 2018, playing a punishing form of brutal death metal informed by hardcore aggression and gore-themed lyrical content. After a series of self-released demos and the Northeastern Deprivation compilation (2019), the band signed to Century Media Records and released their second album Terrified of God in October 2024, cementing their place in the current wave of brutal death metal.

Formed in Buffalo in 2020, Vomit Hounds drag black and death metal through the industrial grit of upstate New York's underbelly. They strike at the intersection where cold, atmospheric black metal hostility collides with death metal's obsession with rot — a combination that suits Buffalo's long winters and grimmer instincts perfectly.