Texas-based Weft formed in 2025, weaving atmospheric folk elements into black metal with an approach that draws on the deep traditions of the natural world rather than the urban metal underground. Their Metal Archives classification as atmospheric folk/black metal signals an interest in texture and landscape over pure extremity. Brand new but already aiming at something larger than the standard black metal template.

Portland's Wehrmacht carry a legendary name back into active service — the original Wehrmacht were crossover thrash pioneers in the 1980s, and this iteration, reforming around 2010, keeps faith with that abrasive legacy. Portland's punk and metal scenes have always coexisted productively, and Wehrmacht sit precisely at that fertile intersection, where the circle pit logic of hardcore drives metal riffs into the red. History and fury, packaged tight.

Madison, Wisconsin's Weightless have been building progressive post-black metal architecture since 2012, a project shaped by the university city's intellectual restlessness and the Midwest's particular kind of brooding intensity. Their music reaches toward the expansive end of what post-black metal allows — layered, dynamic, attentive to where space and silence do the work that riffs cannot. Genuinely ambitious within a genre that tolerates ambition.

Brooklyn's Weightlessness have been combining doom and death metal since 2014 in the dense, eclectic crucible that New York's underground provides. Their sound leans into the death-doom tradition's love of contrast — the crush of doom, the precision of death, the grief that lives between them — with a Brooklyn sourness that keeps it from ever becoming merely atmospheric. Slow, dark, and specific to the place that made them.

Denver's Well of Sacrifice have been mining progressive death metal since 2018, bringing a compositional discipline to extreme music that the Denver scene has increasingly fostered as it has matured. They build death metal that thinks about where it is going — structure and technicality in service of emotional impact rather than as ends in themselves. One of Denver's more serious contributions to the intersection of brutality and craft.

Whiskey-soaked Southern Metal from College Station.

Queens thrash outfit Wench have been in operation since 2011, dragging the Old Bay Area aggression into New York City's outer boroughs with a chip on their shoulder that is entirely appropriate given where they come from. Queens has never been celebrated the way Manhattan or Brooklyn have, and Wench plays thrash that sounds like it knows that — raw, fast, and combative. Everything good about the genre, delivered without ceremony.

Oregon's Wendigo formed in 2019 drawing on the Pacific Northwest's deep reserves of wilderness mythology and perpetual grey — the Wendigo, a cannibalistic spirit of the forests, is perfect fuel for black metal that wants to feel genuinely cold and ancient. Oregon's forests and coastline have shaped some of the region's most atmospheric metal, and Wendigo taps that well with a sound that feels born in the fog. Raw and elemental, exactly as it should be.

Bay Area heavy metal act Werewolf have been operating since 2008 in one of the most historically rich scenes for the genre in the world — Northern California's peninsula of metal royalty. They play traditional heavy metal that is unambiguous in its devotion to the form, shaped by decades of Bay Area precedent while belonging entirely to the current underground. Old blood, still running.