A recent arrival from Santa Rosa, California, Hexen House entered the black metal underground in 2024 with the urgency of a band that has been waiting too long to start. Raw and immediate, their early work sounds less like a debut than a declaration.

Breakneck Black / Speed Metal from Austin.

San Francisco Bay Area act Hexx formed in 1983 under the name Paradox before settling on their current name and releasing the debut No Escape on Mike Varney's Shrapnel Records in 1984, establishing themselves in the nascent US power metal scene. Their sound evolved through the speed and thrash influences of the Bay Area through the late 1980s, culminating in the Century Media-released Morbid Reality (1992), their most technically demanding record. After a long dormancy following that album, founding members reformed the band in 2013 and released Wrath of the Reaper through High Roller Records in 2017.

Salt Lake City's Hibernaut pile sludge, stoner, and doom into a slow-moving mass that seems calibrated to induce a specific kind of narcotic heaviness. Formed in 2023, they occupy the hazy zone where riff weight and psychedelic drift become the same thing.

Franklin, Indiana's Hidden Dagger blend stoner haze and doom weight with groove metal's rhythmic snap, arriving at something simultaneously lumbering and propulsive. Since 2018 they've proven that mid-tempo heaviness can carry as much punch as anything faster.

Michigan's Hideous CHUD take the foundational elements of brutal death and grindcore and run them through an experimental blender, producing results that are as unpredictable as they are punishing. The Roseville outfit seem genuinely uninterested in doing what's expected of them.

A brand-new presence in the avant-garde death metal sphere, Hierarchies arrived in 2025 with technical ambition and a willingness to bend genre logic in pursuit of something genuinely strange. Their approach to death metal is as much compositional problem-solving as it is sonic brutality.

Akron's Hieros draw on the melodic black metal tradition to create music that is sweeping without being saccharine, atmospheric without surrendering aggression. Since 2020 the project has built a sound that sits somewhere between the triumphant and the grim.

Texas desert rock creating massive riffs influenced by Alice in Chains and Queens of the Stone Age.