Formed in Albany, New York in 2024, Doomsday Manifesto is a brand-new force in the capital region's metal scene, bringing a groove-soaked brutality to death metal that hits with the blunt authority of a sledgehammer. The band leans into the midtempo pocket where groove metal's rhythmic swagger meets the throat-ripping aggression of death metal, carving out a sound built for heads that bang slow and hard. Still in their earliest days, they're already staking out territory that separates them from the pack.

Houston's Dreadful have inhabited the bleak corridors of depressive black metal since 2012, crafting music that channels the genre's hallmark anguish and elongated misery with a sincerity that distinguishes them from mere aesthetic exercise. Their Bandcamp presence connects them to a small but devoted audience that seeks out black metal as a form of emotional reckoning rather than spectacle. In a Texas scene dominated by death metal and sludge, they carve out a distinctly isolated and introspective space.

San Francisco's Dying Breath launched in 2025 fusing the Bay Area's storied thrash tradition with groove metal's mid-paced, rhythmically locked riffing, occupying familiar but proven territory for the city's metal scene.

A brand-new act out of Berkeley, Early Demise formed in 2025 at the meeting point of groove metal's chug and nu-metal's attitude, bringing the Bay Area's characteristic edge to a revival-minded heaviness.

San Francisco's Earth Crawler was formed in 2017 at the crossroads of Bay Area thrash and the groove metal tradition, carrying a city's legacy of hard-edged riffing into well-worn but welcome territory.

Tampa's Eating Infinity fuses groove metal's midtempo swagger with death metal's ferocity — a combination that makes sense coming from a city with Florida death metal in its civic DNA.

Benicia, California's Ebola is a technical death/thrash outfit formed in 2016, the kind of band that treats musical precision and unrelenting aggression as two sides of the same coin.

Named for the medical term for bruising, Powhatan, Virginia's Ecchymosis melds groove metal's midtempo churn with death metal's heavier inclinations, active since 2015 and apparently comfortable leaving marks.

Eden Burns work the groove-heavy end of heavy metal with a muscular, no-nonsense approach, formed in Bowie in 2020 with enough swing in the riffs to keep heads moving.