A power trio formed in Tempe, Arizona, in 2012, The Black Moods built a loyal national audience through relentless touring, sharing stages with Whitesnake, Godsmack, and Robbie Krieger before ever breaking through on radio. Their album Sunshine (2020) produced four singles that charted in the Top 30 of Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart, and its follow-up Into the Night (2022), produced by Grammy-nominated Johnny K, consolidated their position as a reliable force in contemporary blues-driven hard rock. The trio draws from Led Zeppelin and Foo Fighters without slavish imitation, anchored by guitarist and vocalist Josh Kennedy's gritty delivery.

Blackened thrash "for a desert funeral." Features Zawicizuz, former guitarist on Absu's acclaimed 2009 self-titled album.

The Black Wizard is a black metal band from Temuco, in the Araucanía region of Chile, formed in 2021. The band has released two demos, Ceremonia (2021) and Fúnebre (2022), building their catalog as an independent act in the Chilean underground.

Coral Springs, Florida's The Blind Beholder operate in the atmospheric and depressive wing of black metal, building music that uses the genre's cold, minimalist textures to conjure isolation and inward collapse rather than outward fury. Formed in 2018, they channel something genuinely bleak into their sound — the kind of heavy music that feels less like an assault than a slow disappearance.

Atlanta's The Blood Mountain Black Metal Choir are a 2025 arrival bringing a choral, atmospheric dimension to black metal — the name alone suggests scale and ceremony, a sound conceived for open spaces and gathering darkness rather than small rooms. They emerge from a city with an increasingly restless extreme metal underground, adding a layer of ritualistic ambition to an already fertile scene.

New York's The Bronx Casket Co. have been crafting gothic/doom metal with a morbid elegance since their 2011 reconstitution, drawing on the genre's marriage of heavy riffs and romantic melancholy that the band has always executed with more craft than camp. Their sound belongs to the tradition of doom that treats grief and darkness as aesthetic resources rather than ends in themselves.

Seattle's The Brown Scare blend groove metal's rhythmic lock-step with stoner metal's hazy, riff-heavy lumber — a combination that fits the Pacific Northwest's particular brand of heavy music, where the weather seems to slow everything down just enough to make the grooves land harder. Active since 2018, they're part of Seattle's ongoing experiment in finding new ways to be heavy without being fast.

Kansas City's The Browning pioneered a polarizing but distinctive fusion of metalcore, electronic dance music, and deathcore that placed thumping EDM drops alongside crushing breakdowns, creating one of the most divisive sounds in modern heavy music. Frontman Jonny McBee's vision of blending festival-ready electronic production with extreme metal aggression anticipated the electronicore trend by several years. Albums like 'Burn This World' and 'Isolation' showcase a band committed to their genre-demolishing approach regardless of purist objections.

Punishing Grindcore / Sludge Metal / Hardcore from Houston.