Russellville, Alabama's What Brings Ruin have been conjuring raw black metal and noise since 2019 from a small Northwest Alabama city that is not traditionally associated with the genre — which is precisely what gives the project its claustrophobic intensity. Raw black metal demands isolation and contempt for comfort, and operating from the rural American South provides both in abundance. Abrasive, unadorned, and made somewhere that most people will never think to look.

Morgantown, West Virginia's Winterfell occupy the rawest, most primitive end of the black metal spectrum — raw black metal laced with ambient elements, formed in 2019 in the isolation of Appalachian West Virginia. The region's wild, forested landscape and cultural remove from metal's mainstream centers makes it a natural home for music this stripped and unfiltered.

Hailing from Topsfield, Massachusetts — a town whose name sits a short distance from the actual Salem Witch Trials geography — Witch Hill formed in 2019 and make raw black metal steeped in regional darkness. The lo-fi aesthetic is deliberate, all hiss and cold tremolo, evoking the fog of colonial New England horror. They are a project that wears its geographic and historical context like a second skin.