Los Angeles spawned Scornmonger in 2025, a death metal project arriving in the city's perpetually crowded extreme music scene with something to prove. Rooted in the meat-and-bone tradition of straight death metal — dense, down-tuned riffing, blasted rhythms, and a vocal approach that's all growl and gravel — they carry the L.A. lineage of brutality without dressing it up. Young but clearly schooled, they sound like they've been studying the genre's architecture before tearing walls down.

Austin classic heavy rock in the vein of early Sabbath and Zeppelin. Big riffs, bigger hooks.

Scott Kelly is the longtime frontman of sludge-doom legends Neurosis, and his solo work — launched in Oakland in 2001 — strips the massive amplification away to reveal something rawer and more intimate: acoustic folk, sparse progressive structures, and the same scarred emotional intensity that defines his work with his main band. His voice, weathered and confessional, carries the weight of decades of extreme music through arrangements built on fingerpicked guitar and quiet devastation. It is metal's spirit filtered through folk's bones.

Scott Stapp is an American singer and songwriter from Florida, best known as the co-founder and lead vocalist of Creed, the multi-platinum rock band whose albums My Own Prison (1997) and Human Clay (1999) together sold over seventeen million copies in the United States. After Creed dissolved in 2004, Stapp launched a solo career with The Great Divide (2005), which reached platinum certification, followed by Proof of Life (2013) and The Space Between the Shadows (2019). His fourth solo album Higher Power, released through Napalm Records in March 2024, produced the highest-charting non-Creed single of his career, reaching number 12 on Mainstream Rock Airplay.

Scour is a black metal supergroup formed in 2016 featuring Phil Anselmo of Pantera alongside members of Cattle Decapitation and Misery Index — and their sound is exactly as unhinged as that collaboration suggests. Dispensing with any of the atmospheric or philosophical trappings that define more artful black metal, Scour strips the genre down to its most primal violence: blinding blast beats, shrieked vocals, and riffs that feel like static electricity at lethal voltage. They are a study in pure, focused extremity.

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Seattle's Scourge Schematic have been waging war against listenability since 2011, welding death metal's surgical brutality to grindcore's contempt for length and patience. Songs arrive and detonate in seconds; riffs mutate before they've finished establishing themselves; the drumming functions more like a pressure system than a pulse. They occupy the Pacific Northwest's tradition of aggressive extremity — a city that birthed grunge somehow also fosters bands intent on leaving nothing intact.

Corpus Christi, Texas's Scourgery has been dealing in brutal death metal since 2017 with the kind of suffocating density that the Gulf Coast heat seems to produce naturally. Their music is defined by inhuman gutturals, chromatic guitar work that shifts between slab-like grooves and technical spiral dives, and percussion that operates at the threshold of physical endurance. South Texas brutal death has its own character — isolated, siege-like, built to outlast comfort — and Scourgery embodies that without compromise.