New York's Heretic Bodyhammer arrived in 2022 with a death metal attack that the name describes better than most press releases could — blunt, aggressive, and deliberately mechanical in its devastation. They hit like the instrument in question.

Atlanta's Heretical Rites blend blackened death metal into something caustic and ceremonial since their 2024 inception, approaching the genre's darkest traditions with a sense of ritual purpose. Georgia's underground gains a genuinely malevolent new voice.

Santa Fe, New Mexico's Heretical Sect bring a desolate, high-desert black metal aesthetic to the genre since 2019 — sparse, harsh, and imbued with the particular loneliness of the American Southwest. Their sound is as dry and unforgiving as the landscape.

Fresno's Heritage of Rebellion arrived in 2023 with death metal grounded in the Central Valley's blue-collar discontent — straightforward in its violence, unpretentious in its execution, and built to be played loud. A band that earns the defiance in their name.

Burlington, North Carolina's Hermaeus Mora began as an atmospheric black and death metal act in 2015 before evolving toward metalcore, always guided by a cinematic heaviness and an appetite for transformation. Named for the Daedric Prince of forbidden knowledge, they've pursued their own sonic secrets across several years of restless genre movement.

Fort Worth's Herniated have been delivering brutal death metal since 2016 with the industrial-grade aggression you'd expect from Texas's hard-working metal underground. Dense, punishing, and unapologetically extreme.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania metalcore band Hero Destroyed coalesced from a local metal outfit active since the late 1990s before reforming under the current name in 2005 and signing to Relapse Records. Their self-titled debut album, released in 2008, drew comparisons to Converge and Curl Up and Die for its chaotic, dissonant approach to the genre. The band occupies a space in the heavier, more abrasive end of the mid-2000s metalcore spectrum.

Athens, Georgia's Heroic Depletion specialize in raw black metal that is deliberately abrasive and deliberately lo-fi since 2019 — the kind of music that sounds like it was recorded in a state of genuine grievance. Primitive in all the ways that matter.

Blasphemous Black Metal from Kentucky/.