Boston's Tentacle have been exploring the furthest reaches of drone/doom since 2012, a city with a rich tradition of crushing, slow-moving metal that they honor and push into more abstract territory. Their music is more ritual than song — long, pulsating walls of sound that use repetition as a tool of trance rather than laziness.

Detroit's The ChristPunchers have been wallowing in drone/doom metal and ambient darkness since 2011, their name an act of provocation matched by music that slows riffs to a near-geological tempo and lets dissonance linger until it becomes its own form of heavy. They're a product of Detroit's underground, where extremity has always found creative expression in the city's post-industrial silence.

Baton Rouge's Thou are one of the defining names in American sludge and drone-doom, known for prolific output, uncompromising heaviness, and a DIY ethos rooted in the South's noise and punk traditions since their 2007 formation. Their music moves at a suffocating crawl, layering feedback, anguish, and political fury into some of the most crushing slow-burn metal of the past two decades.

Salem, Oregon's Thrones is essentially a solo project that has operated since 1996 under the creative direction of one of the American underground's most idiosyncratic figures, building an enormous bass-driven drone and doom sound that is utterly its own thing. Slow, cavernous, and hypnotic, Thrones occupies a unique corner of the heavy music spectrum where doom, noise, and experimental music collapse into a single suffocating mass.

California's Towering, active since 2016, occupy the slow, suffocating space where drone, doom, and sludge converge, building massive walls of distortion and deliberate, glacial pacing into music that functions more as a physical experience than a conventional listen.

Portland drone and doom metal act formed in 2017, pushing long-form, minimalist compositions into near-meditative territory where repetition and volume become the primary tools. Their Bandcamp URL 'ofthetrees' reflects the woodsy, organic quality of their oppressive sound.

Tacoma, Washington drone/doom/post-metal duo active since 2014, sculpting monolithic, slowly evolving soundscapes from feedback and repetition in the tradition of the Pacific Northwest's most extreme slow music.