Out of Oakland, California since 2016, Vortex of Narvik operates in the suffocating register of depressive black metal layered with ambient drift. The name evokes the desolate Arctic port city that became a symbol of brutal attrition, and the music follows suit — long, spiraling compositions that trade in anguish and cold isolation. Ambient passages erode into raw black metal without warning, keeping the listener perpetually off-balance.

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.

Maple Grove, Minnesota's Winterthermia formed in 2025, taking depressive black metal's most inward-looking, anguished qualities and placing them in one of the coldest, most winter-defined states in the country — a setting that doesn't require any artistic license to justify the genre's obsessions. Their name fuses the season with suffering, and in Minnesota's brutal winters, that metaphor requires no translation.