Phoenix's Halls of Mandos take their name from Tolkien's realm of the dead and build their sound accordingly — doom-laden, post-metal architecture with industrial undercurrents that give the music a cold, machine-like dread. An intriguing young project born in 2023.

San Diego's Hanging Garden have cultivated a strain of depressive black metal since 2013 that leans heavily into isolation and despair, letting long, suffocating passages take root in the mind.

Atlanta's Haunting Eden bring gothic metal's signature interplay of beauty and darkness to the Georgia scene, pairing heavy instrumentation with a melodic sensibility that leans into the theatrical and the melancholic.

Minneapolis' Himmelschor — German for "heavenly choir" — bring gothic metal's orchestral melancholy and romantic darkness to a city not typically associated with the genre. The project, born in 2024, balances grandeur with the grim, inhabiting the same emotional space as a crumbling cathedral.