Chattanooga, Tennessee's Puke play blunt-force brutal death metal without apology, delivering the genre's trademark gutturals and pulverizing rhythm work with a Southern rawness since forming in 2013. They operate in the uglier, less polished corner of the brutal death scene.

Pulchra Morte — Latin for "beautiful death" — are a US doom/death outfit that leans into funereal pacing and thick, mournful atmosphere, marrying cavernous death metal riffs to the slow-drag sorrow of traditional doom. Active since 2018, their sound is dense, deliberate, and uncompromising.

Simi Valley, California's Pulley are a melodic punk institution whose tight, driving sound and vocalist Scott Radinsky's distinctive rasp helped define the late-1990s Epitaph Records roster alongside peers like Pennywise and NOFX. Radinsky, remarkably, balanced his punk career with a professional baseball stint as a Major League relief pitcher, lending Pulley an only-in-California backstory. Albums like 'Esteem Driven Engine' and '60 Cycle Hum' showcase their mastery of the SoCal melodic hardcore formula: fast tempos, big hooks, and working-class lyrical directness.

Atlanta's Pulpit formed in 2022 at the intersection of sludge metal's corrosive weight and hardcore's confrontational directness, channeling the ugliest impulses of both genres into something punishing and focused. Short songs, thick riffs, and zero tolerance for comfort.

California's Pulpit Vomit launched in 2022 as a grindcore project with an irreverent, blasphemous edge built into the name and the music alike — bursts of caustic noise kept as brief and as violent as the genre demands. Their Bandcamp presence suggests an overlap in identity with the Atlanta sludge band Pulpit, but they operate as a distinct grind entity.

Fayetteville, Arkansas's Pulsar Colony bend black metal into psychedelic and experimental shapes, using the genre's cold tremolo architecture as a launching pad for disorienting, outer-space explorations. Since 2014 they've been one of the more adventurous outliers to emerge from the mid-South underground.

Devastating Slam / Brutal Death Metal from Corpus Christi, Texas / Kansas / New Mexico.

Cleveland's Punching Moses have been at it since 2012, playing a hard-nosed crossover that draws equally from Bay Area thrash and Midwest hardcore — aggressive, blunt, and grounded in the blue-collar ethos of the city they come from. Expect circle-pit riffs and no philosophical hedging.

Arlington, Texas veterans Puncture have been operating since 1994, working a niche of industrial groove metal that grafts mechanized texture and electronic abrasion onto the mid-period Pantera-era heaviness that saturated the DFW scene of that era. Longevity alone makes them a notable piece of local history.