Chicago's Nocturne arrived in 2021, adding another entry to the city's longstanding underground black metal tradition that stretches back through decades of midwestern grime and cold. Operating under a name borrowed from the classical nocturne — a form associated with night and quiet introspection — the band brings those dualities to black metal's confrontational noise. Chicago's dense urban landscape and brutal winters make for a fitting backdrop for their particular shade of darkness.

Nocturnus was formed in Tampa, Florida in 1987 by drummer and vocalist Mike Browning, a former member of Morbid Angel, and built a sound around science fiction themes and prominent keyboard use at a time when such elements were virtually absent from extreme metal. Their 1990 debut The Key, recorded at Morrisound and released on Earache, is widely credited as one of the first progressive death metal albums and remains a landmark in the genre's development. The band dissolved after internal conflicts and Browning later revived the project as Nocturnus AD, releasing a long-awaited sequel to The Key's narrative in 2019.

Pampa, Texas — a small panhandle city far removed from the state's major metal centers — is home to Nocturnus Mortis, a black metal project formed in 2020 that carries isolation and desolation in its very geography. The name, Latin for "death by night," signals an orthodox approach to the genre's themes of mortality and darkness. Operating well outside any metropolitan scene, the project embodies the solitary, self-sufficient spirit that has always driven the most genuine underground black metal.

Framingham, Massachusetts' Nocuous have been forging a cross-genre assault since 2014 that draws equally from thrash, black, and death metal — a combination that refuses to settle into any single lane. The band's approach maps onto the New England extreme metal tradition, where the region's long underground history has produced some of the most technically and tonally aggressive American metal. More than a decade in, Nocuous continue refining a sound that's equal parts ferocity and craft.

Cincinnati's Nogothula entered the blackened death metal space in 2022 with a sound built on the most corrosive qualities of both parent genres — the cold tremolo hostility of black metal fused with death metal's crushing low-end and blasting intensity. Ohio's underground metal scene has historically punched above its weight, and Nogothula continues that tradition by pushing the extremes of a hybrid genre rather than softening them. The project's name carries a mythic, incantatory quality that matches their dense and ritualistic approach.

Frigid Black Metal from Fort Worth.

please update this band

please update this band

Unhinged Grindcore from Albuquerque, New Mexico (early); Texas / California / New Mexico (later).