Santa Clara's Halloween play heavy metal with hard rock instincts — melodic, energetic, and rooted in the kind of song-first approach that made the genre commercially viable in the first place. A Bay Area act keeping the classic sound alive since 2015.

Atlanta thrash pioneers Hallows Eve have been at it since 1985, predating most of the genre's defining records and helping establish the Southern US as a legitimate player in extreme metal's early years. Their aggressive, speed-forward approach influenced a generation of acts and they remain one of Georgia's most important metal exports.

Phoenix's Halls of Mandos take their name from Tolkien's realm of the dead and build their sound accordingly — doom-laden, post-metal architecture with industrial undercurrents that give the music a cold, machine-like dread. An intriguing young project born in 2023.

Scranton, Pennsylvania's Hallucination are death metal veterans in the truest sense — their formation date of 1969 makes them one of the stranger entries in any metal database, a pre-death metal act whose legacy stretches across decades of Pennsylvania's underground.

Rochester's Hallucination Realized play grindcore with the frantic urgency the format demands — short, explosive, and loud enough to rattle teeth. Part of a small but active upstate New York extreme underground since 2018.

Boston's Hallucivore arrived in 2025 fusing black and death metal in the tradition of the American underground — caustic, hostile, and pulling no punches. New England has a long black metal history, and this is a promising entry into it.

New York's Hallux carve out a sludge/doom sound built on weight and repetition — riffs that settle in and refuse to leave, tempos that drag the listener through the muck. Formed in 2018, location unspecified, but the music speaks clearly enough.

Atlanta's Halmos have been dragging riffs through the Georgia heat since 2012, fusing the molasses weight of sludge metal with the hazy warmth of stoner grooves. Their sound sits in the slow, crushing pocket where feedback meets sweat.

Born out of rural Pennsylvania in 2022, Halo of Flesh deal in raw black metal and noise — corrosive, lo-fi, and deliberately hostile. There is nothing polished about what they do, and that is entirely the point.