Lockport, Illinois's Darkdark pursues experimental raw black metal with a studied indifference to convention, producing work since 2012 that weaponizes noise and dissonance in ways that even many black metal listeners find confrontational.

Denver's David Scafidi approaches experimental death/thrash with a restless disregard for convention, pushing the genre's templates toward stranger and more unpredictable territory from Colorado's thriving underground metal scene since 2023.

Southern California's Dead Cross are a supergroup project that tears through crossover thrash and hardcore punk with an experimental bent — unpredictable, intense, and built from some of the genre's most experienced musicians. Their music moves fast and thinks faster.

Greenville, South Carolina's Dead Crustacean apply an experimental lens to grindcore, twisting the genre's blunt-force template into strange, lurching shapes that reward repeated listens. An outlier in the Southeast's metal underground.

Los Angeles's Death and the Lament treat experimental black/death metal as genuine sonic research, pushing the boundaries of both genres into uncharted and often unsettling territory since 2014. Their work rewards listeners willing to sit with discomfort.

New Jersey's Decimate Our Kind doesn't fit neatly anywhere — their experimental death/thrash framework bends and fractures in unexpected directions, treating genre conventions as a starting point rather than a destination. Founded in 2021, they're one of the Garden State underground's more genuinely unpredictable propositions.

Yuma, Arizona's Dissefacto have been doing something genuinely strange since 2014, pushing experimental metal into territories that resist easy categorization — a fitting output from one of the American Southwest's more isolated music scenes. Their work resists the comfort of genre convention, reflecting a willingness to rupture form rather than inhabit it.

Los Angeles's Divola have been bending stoner metal through an experimental prism since 2013, producing music that swaps the subgenre's usual comfort-food riff cycles for something stranger and more unpredictable. Operating in the LA underground, they bring a psychedelic restlessness to heavy music that resists the familiar and keeps the listener off-balance.

St. Louis's Dodecad have been pushing sludge metal into experimental and technical territory since 2015, working in a Midwestern city with a genuine appetite for heavy music that defies easy categorization. Named for the number twelve, they bring a mathematical restlessness to the genre's usual swamp-trudge, resulting in sludge that rewards close listening as much as the gut-punch of volume.

Formed in Industry, Pennsylvania in 2021, Drawn from Apathy occupy the restless space where progressive metal splinters into something more difficult to name, blending structural ambition with experimental dissonance that resists easy categorization. Their relatively recent formation belies a compositional maturity that suggests musicians who arrived with a clear and uncommon vision from the start. They are a band that rewards patience, revealing new layers the further into their work you venture.

Based out of Clifton and active since 2021, Dripping operate at the extreme outer edge of slam and brutal death metal, injecting experimental sensibilities into an already punishing framework. The result is something deliberately disorienting — dense slabs of down-tuned brutality interrupted by moments of calculated sonic wrongness that keep listeners off balance.

Chicago's Drug Honkey has been warping death and doom metal into something genuinely hallucinogenic since 2005, blending cavernous death metal with funeral-paced doom and a deeply psychedelic, experimental sensibility. Two decades into their existence, they remain one of the stranger and more uncompromising acts in the American underground, their music evoking a chemical dread few bands can match.

Out of Fort Collins since 2021, Drug Mouse fuses black metal's atmosphere and abrasion with death metal's brutality through an experimental lens that resists any straightforward genre read. The project pushes into disorienting, unpredictable territory, reflecting an appetite for deconstruction that has become a hallmark of Colorado's younger extreme metal crop.

Taking their name from Jewish folklore's restless spirit, Boulder, Colorado's Dybbuk have woven together Viking, folk, and black metal since 2012, creating a distinctly atmospheric brand of pagan metal grounded in mythological imagery and sweeping melodic sensibility.