Maryland's Ghoul King emerged in 2018 to pay thrash metal homage to horror and the occult with a stripped-down directness that cuts through pretension — just riffs, speed, and the conviction that the old ways are the right ways.

San Diego's Ghoulgotha have been tunneling through the earth's dark layers with death/doom metal since 2015, their cavernous sound drawing on the city's deep underground tradition to produce something ancient, doomed, and fully subterranean.

Michigan City, Indiana's Ghoulish Grin surfaced in 2024 with a black/death metal attack that wears its malice openly — primitive, lurching, and lit from within by the kind of necromantic enthusiasm that makes new death metal worth paying attention to.

Named after the hunger hormone, Tucson's Ghrelin are a 2023-formed death metal and grindcore act whose music has the ravenous quality their name implies — short, punishing outbursts of extreme metal from the Sonoran Desert, always hungry for more damage.

Seattle's Ghuuliathe have been crafting atmospheric black metal of unusual depth and isolation since 2015 — long-form compositions where Pacific Northwest rain and gloom seep into every passage, producing something cosmically bleak and hypnotically cold.

From Sierra Vista, Arizona — a border town in the shadow of the Huachuca Mountains — Ghâshthrak have been channeling death metal, black metal, and grindcore into something raw and geographically extreme since 2019. The desert's harshness runs through every blast beat.

Plano's Giant of the Mountain fuse progressive ambition with the raw extremity of black and death metal, building sprawling, technically demanding compositions that refuse to settle into any single genre. Their work since 2010 rewards patience and repeated listening.

Sacramento's Giant Squid have spent over two decades crafting some of the most literary and emotionally complex music at the intersection of doom, post-metal, and progressive rock. Their ocean-deep arrangements unfold like dark novels in sound.

Out of Orono, Maine, GiantGiant layer stoner heaviness beneath progressive arrangements and doom-paced tempos, creating music that feels simultaneously earthbound and labyrinthine. The double name signals the doubled-down ambition behind every riff.