Portland, Maine's Megog have been conjuring cold Atlantic black metal since 2017, pulling the elemental severity of their New England coastline into recordings that feel raw and ritualistically bleak. Their approach favors atmosphere and hostility over polish, embracing the genre's most uncompromising conventions.

New Orleans black metal act Mehenet carry the distinctive atmosphere of their city — its rot, its heat, its occult undercurrent — into a sound that's been developing since 2018. Unlike the city's dominant doom and sludge tradition, Mehenet channels that darkness through the tremolo-drenched, ceremonial intensity of pure black metal.

Heavy Heavy Metal / Hard Rock from Austin.

Brooklyn's Melissa emerged in 2021 dragging black metal through the borough's gutter — all corroded riffs, spat-out vocals, and punk scorn welded onto a raw, lo-fi chassis. The New York City underground has long been fertile ground for this kind of corrosive collision, and Melissa leans into it without apology, favoring atmosphere built from filth rather than grandeur. Their black metal/punk hybrid feels less like genre tourism and more like a natural product of a city that has never had time for pretense.

Formed in 2025 in Bozeman, Montana, Melted Eyes represent something rare in death metal: a band emerging from a landscape more associated with wilderness than metal scenes, channeling that geographic isolation into a sound that feels genuinely removed from any obvious metropolitan influence. Their approach to death metal leans into brutality and atmosphere equally, suggesting a project built from the ground up with little concern for trend or precedent. Bozeman is not a city that produces death metal acts often, which makes the existence of Melted Eyes all the more striking.

Aurora, Illinois gave birth to Melting Rot in 2025, a grindcore outfit that wastes no time and shows no mercy. Short songs, maximum punishment — their grindcore is rooted in the classic tradition of brevity as brutality, weaponizing speed and noise against any expectation of melody or restraint. Aurora sits in Chicago's orbit, and that industrial midwest grit runs through Melting Rot's aesthetic like a live wire.

The Melvins, led by the inimitable Buzz Osborne and powerhouse drummer Dale Crover, are one of the most prolific and influential bands in heavy music history, having helped birth both grunge and sludge metal from their origins in Montesano, Washington. Their early work directly influenced Nirvana, Soundgarden, and the entire Pacific Northwest heavy scene, while their restless experimentation across 30+ studio albums has touched on everything from drone metal to punk rock to noise pop. Defiantly uncommercial yet universally respected, the Melvins exist as a singular, irreducible force in underground music.

Woodland, California's Memento Mori have spent over a decade — since 2012 — navigating the uncomfortable space where progressive ambition collides with death metal's most destructive impulses. They construct songs of genuine compositional depth without sanding away the aggression that makes death metal viscerally compelling, threading technical passages through punishing rhythmic slabs. It is a balance many bands attempt and few achieve with the kind of coherent vision Memento Mori have developed across their catalog.

please update this band