Tulsa's Medicine Horse emerged in 2023 at the intersection of Southern metal, sludge, and doom — a fitting combination for Oklahoma's red-dirt expanse and oil-field grimness. Their sound is slow and swamp-thick, dragging humid riffs through the kind of landscape that breeds spiritual weight.

DeSoto County, Mississippi's Mississippi Burning forge a regionally charged sound that locks the Southern metal tradition's bluesy swagger into the ferocity of death and thrash metal, producing a distinctly American extreme metal voice since their 2022 formation.

Townsend, Massachusetts' Mucklers Circle carve out an unusual niche by mixing Southern metal swagger with New England-forged groove and metalcore aggression, resulting in a genre-blurring take on heavy music that has no business working as well as it does since 2015.

Atlanta's MuckRaker have been digging into the Southern metal tradition since 2012, delivering the heavy, groove-soaked, Dixie-rooted metal that Georgia's scene does best with a rawness befitting their name's muck-dwelling imagery.