Kansas City's Valiant Reason have been grinding and gutting since 2017, fusing death metal's ferocity with grindcore's relentless pace. Short, savage, and surgically brutal — they're one of the Midwest's most punishing outfits.

Crushing Death Metal / Grindcore from Dallas.

Indianapolis grindcore outfit Venality have been trading in rapid-fire moral disgust since 2021, compressing maximum hostility into minimum runtime. Short songs, maximum impact — pure grind from the heart of the Midwest.

Denton, Texas' Vikar arrived in 2020 to obliterate everything in under two minutes at a time, as grindcore demands. Steeped in the absurdist fury and DIY ferocity that has long defined Denton's punk-adjacent underground, they waste no time getting to the point.

Chicago's Vindicta arrived in 2021 swinging across black metal, death metal, and grindcore in a way that refuses to settle — brutally fast passages bleed into cold, malevolent atmosphere and back again without warning. The band embodies the confrontational ethos of the city's extreme underground, compressing maximum hostility into a minimum of wasted space.

Boston's Virulence stands apart in the death-grind landscape by incorporating jazz-influenced harmonic thinking into an otherwise ferocious framework — an approach that creates unexpected tension between structure and chaos. Founded in 2022, they occupy a niche in the city's storied extreme metal scene that is entirely their own, making even the most dissonant passages feel intentional.

Columbus, Ohio grindcore and death metal band formed in 2016, fusing the genre's velocity and crust punk's anarchic rawness with death metal's low-end devastation. Rooted in Columbus's scrappy DIY underground, Voice of Crows produce music with both political sharpness and physical force, treating brevity and brutality as equally essential tools.

Detroit's Vomiphilia rose from the city's already abrasive underground in 2021, fusing death metal's grotesque anatomy with goregrind's fixation on bodily horror. Their music lands with the blunt force of a city that has never had much patience for subtlety — raw, disgusting, and thoroughly committed to extremity.

New York's Vomit Fist have been hammering out short, brutal grindcore assaults since 2014, the kind of band that treats song length as a luxury they simply can't afford. Relentless blastbeats and serrated riffs delivered with zero ornamentation define their output — pure grind economy from a state with a long, vicious tradition of it.

Charlotte, North Carolina's Votnut have been grinding since 2012, building a catalogue of short, furious grindcore that has no patience for anything that doesn't immediately attack. The band fits squarely within grindcore's tradition of radical brevity and maximum intensity, with songs that land like a series of quick body blows. More than a decade into their existence, they remain a stubborn fixture in the Southeast underground.

Connecticut's Vouroborus have been fusing blackened death metal and grindcore since 2015, carving out a niche in the dense, chaotic overlap between those extremes. The band's name evokes the ouroboros — the serpent consuming itself — which fits a sound built on cycles of escalating brutality and collapsing structure. Their approach draws equally from death metal's heaviness, black metal's atmosphere, and grindcore's violent concision.

Aurora, Colorado's Voyage of the Blastronaut have been orbiting the death metal and grindcore intersection since 2013, bringing a sardonic cosmic sensibility to music that is otherwise relentlessly brutal. The name is part science-fiction absurdism, part honest description — the music blasts with grindcore velocity while death metal's low-end gravity keeps everything from flying apart. Over more than a decade they have refined this particular combination into something distinctly their own.

Morgantown, West Virginia's Vulgar Royalty formed in 2021 with a sound that collapses grindcore, hardcore, and sludge metal into one misanthropic heap. The combination gives their music a relentless forward momentum shot through with the kind of slow, grinding dread that sludge does best.