Portland's Hellshock have spent over two decades hammering out a vicious blend of crust punk, death metal, and thrash — a trifecta of filth that hits like a pipe wrench wrapped in barbed wire. Since 2001, they've remained one of the Pacific Northwest's most reliably punishing acts.

Augusta, Maine's Hellstorm have cultivated a death metal attack since 2010 that draws on the bleakness of New England winters — relentless, punishing, and completely indifferent to comfort. They are one of the more isolated and underrated voices in the northeastern underground.

Phoenix's Hellven have been dealing in desert-baked thrash metal since 2015, the kind of straight-ahead speed and aggression that makes sense when you're living somewhere that tries to kill you with heat alone. Their riffs carry both the urgency and the dryness of the Sonoran landscape.

Supergroup formed by Pantera's Vinnie Paul and Mudvayne's Chad Gray. Six studio albums of groove metal. On hiatus since Vinnie Paul's death.

Chicago's Helms Deep take a darker road than their namesake, fusing black metal's corrosive atmosphere with thrash metal's velocity since forming in 2023. The result is a siege engine built for underground assault rather than arena glory.

San Francisco's Herpes lean into D-beat and goregrind with the kind of self-aware punk nihilism that the Bay Area's underground has always nurtured since their 2010 formation. The name tells you everything about their attitude toward conventional good taste.

Philadelphia's Hessian strip the genre back to its most feral components — black metal ferocity, speed metal momentum, and the raw bite of early thrash. Since 2014 they've operated at the intersection where aggression meets velocity.

Minneapolis thrash unit Hex Vortices arrived in 2019 with a classic approach to the genre's mechanics — locked-in riffing, forward-leaning rhythm, and vocals that spit rather than sing. Fast and unambiguous, they owe more to Bay Area forebears than to modern metal's smoothed-out edges.

From Saugerties, New York, Hexe Krieg weaponize the convergence of thrash, death, and speed metal into something relentlessly kinetic. Since 2012 the band has pursued a style that is as mechanically aggressive as it is single-minded in purpose.