San Francisco's Weakling occupy a peculiar position in American black metal — despite forming in 2011 under the name of one of the genre's legendary one-album acts, they carry that city's long tradition of underground weirdness and uncompromising darkness. San Francisco has always hosted black metal that bends in unexpected directions, and Weakling operates in that lineage. Whatever their relationship to the original band's shadow, they carry the name as if they own it.

Denver's Weapönizer have been waging black/thrash war since 2011, bringing the classic Teutonic-style extremity of the form to a city whose altitude seems to sharpen everything into something more dangerous. The umlaut is earned: their music operates in the savage tradition of early Kreator and Sodom filtered through American blackened aggression. Relentless, deliberately raw, and built for maximum hostile impact.

Born Joseph Poole in Charlotte, North Carolina, Wednesday 13 built his career through successive horror-themed projects — Frankenstein Drag Queens from Planet 13 in the mid-1990s and the widely exposed Murderdolls, a collaboration with Slipknot drummer Joey Jordison — before launching his eponymous solo band in 2004. Drawing equally from Alice Cooper theatrics, glam metal, and death rock, the project debuted with Transylvania 90210: Songs of Death, Dying, and the Dead (2005) and has sustained a prolific output of horror-inflected heavy metal ever since. He remains one of the most consistent figures in the horror punk and dark metal crossover space.

Formed in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1998 by bassist and vocalist Dave "Dixie" Collins, a veteran of the sludge act Buzzoven, Weedeater channel the heaviest elements of Southern doom and noise rock into a characteristically filthy, low-register rumble. Their debut ...And Justice for Y'all (2001) and Sixteen Tons (2003) appeared on Berserker Records before the band joined Southern Lord for God Luck and Good Speed. Their most recent album, Goliathan (2015), continued the uncompromising approach that made them central figures in the North Carolina heavy underground.

Formed in DeKalb, Illinois in 2004, Weekend Nachos established themselves as one of the most uncompromising forces in American powerviolence, combining blast-beat ferocity with lurching sludge breakdowns and unflinching lyrical confrontation. After a debut full-length on Cowabunga Records, the band released four albums through Relapse Records — Unforgivable (2009), Worthless (2011), Still (2013), and the farewell Apology (2016) — before their 2017 retirement and eventual 2023 reunion. Their influence on the intersection of powerviolence and sludge has been substantial.

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.