North Carolina's Droid Killer have been fusing death and doom metal since 2014, creating music that moves with the grinding inevitability of heavy machinery. The death/doom combination they work in lends itself to a particular kind of dread — too slow to thrash, too savage to drift, and fully committed to both extremes at once.

Madison, Wisconsin's Droids Attack have been a fixture of the Midwest stoner metal underground since 2004, building a catalog of heavy, fuzz-loaded riff rock that nods to the desert rock lineage while keeping things rooted in the Midwest's own brand of unpretentious heaviness. Over two decades they've honed a sound that's equal parts groove and tonnage.

Out of Birmingham, Alabama — a city with its own long history of heavy music — Drood have been crafting death/doom metal since 2017 that leans into the slower, more mournful qualities of the form. Their sound carries the oppressive atmosphere that Birmingham's industrial heritage seems to lend to music, with death metal's brutality filtered through doom's bottomless patience.

Denver's Drop Dead, Gorgeous brought progressive melodic metalcore to the mid-2000s scene with lush synth textures and dynamic vocal interplay between Danny Stillman's screams and clean passages. After three albums culminating in 'The Hot N' Heavy' charting on the Billboard 200, the band went on hiatus in 2011 before reemerging with new music over a decade later.

Muskegon, Michigan's Drop Hammer came together in 2023 with an unambiguous commitment to thrash metal's core values: speed, aggression, and riffs with genuine whiplash velocity. As one of the newer entries in the American thrash underground, they arrive with the focused urgency of a band with something to prove.

Dropkick Murphys are a Quincy, Massachusetts Celtic punk band whose music has become one of Boston's loudest exports. Formed in 1996, the group began with a street-punk and Oi-influenced sound before expanding around bagpipes, mandolin, accordion, and Irish folk melody. Do or Die, The Gang's All Here, Sing Loud, Sing Proud!, Blackout, The Warrior's Code, Going Out in Style, and later albums built a catalog of working-class anthems, family stories, political statements, drinking songs, and memorials. Dropkick Murphys fit punk scope directly through Celtic punk, street punk, and hardcore roots, even though their reach now extends far beyond underground punk rooms. The band's strength is communal force. Choruses are designed to be shouted by thousands, but the best songs still carry the rough push of a band raised on punk rather than folk pageantry alone. Their Boston identity is central, yet the music travels because it turns local pride, grief, solidarity, and stubbornness into simple, durable hooks. Dropkick Murphys made Celtic punk a large-stage language without severing it from its street-level origins.

Louisiana's Dropkik hail from the small town of Luling and have been delivering blunt-force death metal since 2015. There's nothing decorative about their approach — it's direct, violent, and rooted in a blue-collar understanding of what death metal is supposed to accomplish.

Dropout Kings are a nu-metal and rap-metal band from Phoenix, Arizona, formed in 2016 by vocalist Adam Ramey. Fusing heavy metal riffs with hip-hop and trap production, the band released their debut AudioDope in 2018 on Napalm Records, followed by Riot Music (2023) and Yokai (2025). Ramey, the band's founding vocalist and primary creative force, died in May 2025, and Yokai stands as his final recorded statement.

Tampa's DropZone have been operating in the Florida metalcore scene since 2014, bringing the intensity and hardcore-rooted aggression that the genre demands while leaning into the Tampa area's long-established tradition of extreme music. Their metalcore draws from both the melodic and brutal ends of the spectrum.