Sarah Longfield is a progressive metal guitarist and composer born in 1992 in Wisconsin, who began releasing solo material in 2011 and was named one of Guitar World's fifteen greatest 7- and 8-string guitarists in the world. She founded the Madison, Wisconsin-based band The Fine Constant in 2012, releasing the albums Myriad (2012) and Woven in Light (2015), before pursuing her solo career with increasing ambition. Her album Disparity (2018), released through Season of Mist, and the subsequent solo releases SUM (2019) and Dusk (2020) cemented her reputation as a technically sophisticated composer working in progressive and instrumental metal.

Sarcoidosis emerged from the Pittsburgh and Boulder underground scenes in 2017 to pursue slam and brutal death metal with a clinical medical name that suits the genre's tendency toward pathological imagery. Cross-country roots give the band an unusual perspective — the project draws on both the East Coast and Mountain West scenes, blending the slam tradition with brutal death's structural ambitions.

Devastating Technical Brutal Death Metal from Austin.

Boulder, Colorado's Sarcophagus have been mining doom/death metal's mournful depths since 2018, bringing a high-altitude weightiness to a subgenre built on density and grief. The Rocky Mountain setting suits the sound — there's something about thin air and vast silence that maps naturally onto doom/death's slow processions.

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Salt Lake City's Sardoniscorn have been conducting black metal from one of America's most incongruous cities for that genre since 2013 — the mountain geography notwithstanding, Utah's metal underground has always punched well above its weight. Their sound carries the isolation that defines much of the Great Basin, translated into cold, abrasive black metal.

Lawrence, Kansas's Sarkatha arrived in 2023 with a speed/thrash/black metal hybrid that pulls the Great Plains' wide-open emptiness into genuinely ferocious music. They operate in a college town with a surprisingly deep underground tradition, channeling that energy into a sound that refuses to pick just one lane between black metal's cold fury and thrash's kinetic aggression.

Austin's Sarpa have been pursuing black/death metal since 2020, bringing the Texas capital's increasingly dense extreme metal underground another entry in the serpentine tradition the band's name invokes. Their sound moves with the coiled aggression of the subgenre's finest work — death metal's weight carrying the black metal's atmosphere rather than the other way around.

Satan's Satyrs is a doom and heavy metal band from Herndon, Virginia, founded in 2009 by multi-instrumentalist Clayton Burgess while still in high school, blending the downtuned psychedelic weight of Electric Wizard with the aggression of Black Flag. The band gained notable recognition when Electric Wizard championed them and invited Burgess to perform at the 2013 Roadburn Festival, eventually leading to Burgess joining Electric Wizard as bassist. After releasing three LPs—Wild Beyond Belief (2012), Die Screaming (2014), and Don't Deliver Us (2015)—the band disbanded in 2019 before Burgess revived the project with a new lineup in 2023.