Fierce Symphonic Death / Viking Metal out of Texas.

Portland, Oregon's Drown emerged in 2019 with funeral doom metal that takes its name and its mandate seriously — music designed to feel like submersion, all glacially slow tempos, cavernous low-end, and a suffocating emotional weight that discourages any notion of a quick listen. In a city with a rich experimental metal culture, they occupy the most extreme edge of slowness.

Stuart, Florida's Drowned Out blend deathcore's breakdown-driven architecture with the more technical vocabulary of death metal, a pairing they've been refining since 2015. Their sound lands in the brutal middle ground between the two genres — heavy enough for the pit, precise enough to reward close listening.

Dayton, Ohio's Drowner approach heavy music from multiple angles at once — their sound stacks blackened atmosphere on top of droning sludge on top of doom's slow collapse, arriving at something genuinely disorienting in the best possible way. Active since 2022, they belong to a tradition of Midwestern bands that find emotional extremity in sonic density.

Relentless heavy metal from Dallas.

Madison's Drucastil arrived in 2022 with raw black metal that strips the genre down to its most unforgiving essentials — lo-fi production, freezing atmosphere, and a contempt for polish that signals absolute commitment to the form's underground roots. They carry forward the raw black metal tradition with no interest in softening its edges.

Formed in Indianapolis in 2017, Drude constructs dense, tension-filled music at the intersection of progressive metal's compositional ambition and sludge metal's weight. Their sound leans into long-form structures that shift between calculated complexity and crushing heaviness, reflecting the Midwest's tradition of bands that refuse easy genre categorization.

Denver's Drudgery emerged in 2022 with a sharp focus on thrash metal rooted in speed, precision, and aggression. Drawing from the classic thrash playbook, the band channels the energy of a city with a growing extreme metal scene into tightly wound riffs and relentless rhythms.

Drug Church are an Albany, New York post-hardcore band whose music combines punk pressure, grunge-stained guitar hooks, and Patrick Kindlon's dry, cutting vocal perspective. Beginning as a side project in the early 2010s, the band grew into one of the most distinctive names in modern punk-adjacent rock through releases such as Paul Walker, Hit Your Head, Cheer, Hygiene, and Prude. Drug Church fit punk scope through post-hardcore, melodic hardcore, and punk rock, but their appeal also comes from the way they smuggle big alternative-rock choruses into songs that still feel abrasive and suspicious of easy sentiment. The guitars often sound thick and jangling at the same time, the rhythm section keeps a hard forward push, and Kindlon's lyrics turn everyday disappointment into sharply observed scenes. They are not a nostalgia act, though they understand the value of 1990s texture and hardcore economy. Drug Church's best songs feel like walking away from an argument with better lines arriving too late: catchy, annoyed, funny, bruised, and full of motion.