Drift Into Black is a gothic/doom metal project founded in Sayreville, New Jersey in 2017, driven largely by multi-instrumentalist Craig Rossi. A prolific one-man operation, Rossi writes, records, and produces most of the material himself, drawing on doom, progressive metal, and ambient influences. The band has released five full-length albums, including the concept album Earthtorn (2022) and Voices Beneath the Rubble (2024) on Black Lion Records.

Brookfield, Illinois's Earthen has been crafting an unusual folk/gothic metal hybrid with ambient threads since 2005, a project that moves at its own pace and defies easy categorization in the Chicago suburb's quiet underground.

Worcester's Elizabory blend gothic metal's romantic melancholy with black metal's cold fury, a combination that arrived fully formed when the band started in 2023 and already feels like it has its own haunted aesthetic.

Orlando thrash metal project from the Florida underground.

Oakland's Embers fuse black metal's icy atmosphere with doom's crushing weight and crust punk's streetwise grit, building something uniquely Bay Area in its bleakness. Active since 2009, they've carved out a space where political urgency and sonic desolation intersect.

Omaha's Entranced has been weaving progressive gothic and doom metal together since 2021, building a sound that's as emotionally nuanced as it is heavy — mournful melodies, shifting dynamics, and a songwriting sensibility that favors atmosphere over brute force.

Columbus, Ohio's Eris blends gothic atmosphere with death metal brutality, wrapping funereal melodic sensibility around downtuned heaviness in a way that feels both elegiac and aggressive. Formed in 2019, the project channels the goddess of discord into music that holds beauty and destruction in unresolved tension.

Michigan's Erotic Funeral has quietly cultivated a gothic doom sound from Hudsonville since 1995, blending the grandeur of gothic metal's melodic sensibility with the crushing weight of traditional doom in a way that feels genuinely elegiac. Three decades of existence have given the band time to refine an unmistakably mournful identity.

Owensboro's Eternity blends melodic death's precision with gothic metal's haunted atmosphere — a Kentucky band carving out a space where melody and menace coexist since 2016.