A brand-new entry from Kansas City, Missouri, Don Tvsk formed in 2025 at the intersection of black metal's cold fury and doom's crushing torpor. The pairing is a natural one — both genres traffic in despair, just at different tempos — and Kansas City's underrated extreme metal community provides a fitting home for such an uncompromising project. With their ink barely dry, they are among the most recently formed black/doom acts in the current American underground.

Austin, Texas's Doom Prophet have been delivering heavy, crawling doom metal to the Live Music Capital since 2020, adding a darker, heavier counterweight to a city more famous for its blues and rock scene. Their heavy/doom sound is built on the tradition of slow-motion riff architecture and an oppressive atmosphere that Austin's heat and sprawl seem to generate naturally. They are part of a growing contingent of Texas acts demonstrating that the state's metal underground extends far beyond thrash.

Monolithic Melodic Doom Metal from Denton.

Houston female-fronted traditional doom. Signed to Ripple Music.

Florida's DoomWake weaves together depressive black metal and funeral doom into a sound that feels like watching something beautiful rot in the subtropical heat — slow, suffocating, and shot through with cold tremolo melody. Active since 2017, the project operates at the intersection of hopelessness and atmospherics that defines the DSBM tradition, though their doom metal undercurrent adds a physical weight that purely black metal acts often lack. It's music that lingers long after it ends, like a fever that won't break.

Out of Trenton, New Jersey since 2015, DopeRider rolls out a heavy, fuzz-drenched stoner doom that owes as much to Black Sabbath as to the sludgier side of the Sleep catalog. The industrial decay of Trenton seems to seep into their sound, which hits with the grim persistence of a city that's been through the wringer and keeps crawling forward. Their riffs are slow, massive things — the kind that seem to push actual air when they drop.

From the small South Carolina town of Lyman, Doriyah has carved out an imposing blackened death-doom sound since forming in 2021, the isolation of the Upstate region evident in the claustrophobic density of their music. The band pulls from every dark tradition in their genre crossroads — the ferocity of black metal, the devastating weight of doom, the blunt-force trauma of death metal — and synthesizes them into something that feels genuinely oppressive. In a state with a smaller but intensely dedicated metal underground, Doriyah represent the kind of uncompromising artistry that thrives in obscurity.

Dorthia Cottrell is a Richmond, Virginia singer-songwriter best known as the lead vocalist of doom metal band Windhand. Her solo work, begun with a self-titled debut in 2015 on Forcefield Records, channels Appalachian folk, gothic atmosphere, and sparse acoustic arrangements. Her second solo album Death Folk Country (2023) on Relapse Records was shortlisted for the Newlin Music Prize and further established her as a distinctive voice at the intersection of folk and extreme metal.

Los Angeles-based Dowager has been building doom and sludge monoliths since 2014, a fitting project for a city where everything from the traffic to the smog seems to move at a funeral pace. Their sound carries the sprawling, oppressive weight of L.A.'s vastness — slow tempos, massive guitar tones, and a sludge-influenced abrasion that keeps the prettiness of doom metal from becoming comfortable. There's a distinctly urban ugliness to their sound, music made in and for a city that grinds people down.