Chapel Hill, North Carolina project Horseback is the primary creative vehicle of multi-instrumentalist Jenks Miller, who has released more than a dozen recordings since 2007 fusing drone metal, black metal, American roots music, and psychedelic noise into a consistently singular body of work. The Invisible Mountain (2009) and Half Blood (2012) are among the more widely recognized releases in a catalog that has appeared on Relapse, Hydra Head, and Three Lobed Records. Miller's willingness to draw equally from Neil Young's Crazy Horse and the work of Sunn O))) makes Horseback a difficult project to categorize but an easy one to recognize.

Athens, Georgia duo Jucifer are notorious for hauling one of the largest live speaker walls in underground metal and deploying it to devastating effect, channeling sludge, doom, drone, and punk into a wall-of-sound assault that defies easy categorization. Active since 2006, they remain one of the most extreme live acts in American heavy music.

New York's Khanate are one of extreme music's most uncompromising acts — their drone/doom sound is not so much music as an endurance test, sculpting suffocating noise and anguished vocals into harrowing monuments since 2001.

Chicago's Lijde move through cavernous drone and doom with an ambient patience, stretching grief into slow-burning, meditative walls of sound since 2017.

Lexington's Lurking drag black metal into sludge and drone territory, piling glacial riffs on top of one another until the weight becomes its own kind of violence. Since 2016 they've made suffocation feel ceremonial.

A Pennsylvania drone/doom act formed in 2017, Monolithic strip the genre down to its most elemental form — sustained tones, glacial tempos, and near-meditative repetition that collapses under its own weight.

A New England drone/funeral doom project active since 2005, Monument of Urns specialize in extreme slowness and oppressive atmosphere — long-form compositions where texture and tonal weight matter more than conventional song structure.

Huntington, West Virginia's Mother of God operate at the extreme slow end of drone/doom metal, a project that emerged from a region with genuine economic bleakness and channels that weight into suffocating, near-static compositions.

Nashville's Mourner occupy the heaviest intersection of sludge, drone, and doom, dragging listeners through suffocating low-end frequencies and near-static tempos that feel built from the weight of the Tennessee hills.