Boone, North Carolina's Hempire hit the Appalachian highlands with a fusion of sludge and stoner metal since 2022, rolling heavy riffs through cloud banks of fuzz and feedback. Mountain air never sounded this thick.

Brooklyn's Hemzeodysnexia arrived in 2022 with a mouthful of a name and a brutal death metal sound to match — dense, merciless, and technically ferocious, staking out their corner of New York's underground with immediate ferocity.

Oregon's Henbane Chariot evoke the poisonous plant that shares their name — a black metal act born in 2021 with a sound that is murky, hallucinatory, and laced with something deeply unwholesome. Dark folk undertones lurk beneath the blasting.

California's Henry Metal is a solo heavy metal project launched in 2017 that leans into earnest, guitar-forward songwriting with a classicist sensibility. Unpretentious and unabashedly rooted in the riff.

Boston's Hepatagua have been plying their trade in sludge metal since 2013, bringing the Northeast's particular strain of urban heaviness to a genre that thrives on misery and low tuning. Dense, slow, and corrosive in all the right ways.

Greensboro, North Carolina's Hephystus have been crafting progressive metal since 2009, named for the blacksmith god and built with a similar dedication to forging complex structures from raw heavy metal. Their work rewards patience and repeated listens.

Carrollton, Georgia's Her Name Is Death emerged in 2025 with a triptych of doom, drone, and sludge that moves like a slow flood — irreversible and all-consuming. One of the newer acts in the Southern heavy underground, their intentions are already unmistakably bleak.

Named after the ancient Egyptian city discovered underwater in 2000, Herakleion is a death-thrash trio from New Orleans formed in 2021. Guitarist/vocalist Apollo Xydias, drummer Speed Wilson, and bassist Christian Woerner channel the city's heavy music legacy through a prism of thrash and death metal aggression. Their debut EP 'Curse of Eternity' and follow-up 'Necroverse' capture the raw intensity of a band steeped in New Orleans' tradition of punishing, swamp-bred heaviness.

Burlington, Vermont's Heralds of Galaktus bring cosmic-scale destruction down to a very terrestrial grindcore and death metal assault since 2018, naming themselves after a Marvel titan of annihilation while sounding like they could cause some themselves. Short, sharp, and obliterating.