Drift Into Black is a gothic/doom metal project founded in Sayreville, New Jersey in 2017, driven largely by multi-instrumentalist Craig Rossi. A prolific one-man operation, Rossi writes, records, and produces most of the material himself, drawing on doom, progressive metal, and ambient influences. The band has released five full-length albums, including the concept album Earthtorn (2022) and Voices Beneath the Rubble (2024) on Black Lion Records.

Based out of Clifton and active since 2021, Dripping operate at the extreme outer edge of slam and brutal death metal, injecting experimental sensibilities into an already punishing framework. The result is something deliberately disorienting — dense slabs of down-tuned brutality interrupted by moments of calculated sonic wrongness that keep listeners off balance.

Tampa's Dritt Skit — a name borrowed from Norwegian profanity — emerged in 2015 with a cold, stripped-down black metal attack that feels out of place in Florida's humid warmth, which may be precisely the point. Their music channels the grim isolation of the Scandinavian tradition filtered through an American underground sensibility.

Technically stunning power metal from Houston.

Heavy Heavy / Groove Metal from Santa Fe.

Driveways are a Boston band whose music turns pop punk and post-hardcore into a seasonal language of grief, nostalgia, and restless motion. The group is known for an autumnal identity that goes beyond artwork or release timing: October, Halloween imagery, cold weather, coastal memory, and haunted relationships all recur as emotional architecture. EPs and albums such as Night Terrors, October Forever, Skeptic, Into the Past, Skeletal material, Tempest, and Unseen show a band that can write fast, hooky songs without making them feel lightweight. The vocals are urgent and clear, the guitars often carry a darker edge than standard pop punk, and the drums push the songs forward with enough force to connect to post-hardcore audiences. Driveways fit the punk scope through tempo, touring context, and guitar-driven catharsis, but their identity depends on atmosphere as much as genre. Their best tracks make memory feel like a physical place: a highway at night, a shoreline in bad weather, a house full of old ghosts. That specificity keeps the melodrama grounded.

North Carolina's Droid Killer have been fusing death and doom metal since 2014, creating music that moves with the grinding inevitability of heavy machinery. The death/doom combination they work in lends itself to a particular kind of dread — too slow to thrash, too savage to drift, and fully committed to both extremes at once.

Madison, Wisconsin's Droids Attack have been a fixture of the Midwest stoner metal underground since 2004, building a catalog of heavy, fuzz-loaded riff rock that nods to the desert rock lineage while keeping things rooted in the Midwest's own brand of unpretentious heaviness. Over two decades they've honed a sound that's equal parts groove and tonnage.

Out of Birmingham, Alabama — a city with its own long history of heavy music — Drood have been crafting death/doom metal since 2017 that leans into the slower, more mournful qualities of the form. Their sound carries the oppressive atmosphere that Birmingham's industrial heritage seems to lend to music, with death metal's brutality filtered through doom's bottomless patience.