Houston power/speed metal. James Rivera's voice is one of the great Texas metal instruments.

Auburn, Alabama's Hematovore are a rare thing: a progressive metal act with roots stretching back to 1996, carrying decades of accumulated craft and ambition into a sound that evolves without losing its teeth. Their Southern roots inform a sensibility that is both technically meticulous and emotionally direct.

Formed in Mentor, Ohio in 1993, Hemdale were a grind-gore band whose abrasive extremity and relentless live performances earned them a significant underground following before a 1997 split. The band's 1996 split release with Exhumed, In the Name of Gore, remains a key document of the era, and their network extended through drummer Craig Rowe's Visceral Productions, which played a role in the early careers of Nile, Exhumed, and Dying Fetus. Hemdale reformed in 2013 with vocalist and guitarist Matthew Rositano as the sole original member.

New York's Hemlock trade in a stripped-down, venomous strain of black metal since 2018 — the kind of music that feels personal, antagonistic, and far less interested in spectacle than in atmosphere. Cold, minimal, and quietly corrosive.

Boone, North Carolina's Hempire hit the Appalachian highlands with a fusion of sludge and stoner metal since 2022, rolling heavy riffs through cloud banks of fuzz and feedback. Mountain air never sounded this thick.

Brooklyn's Hemzeodysnexia arrived in 2022 with a mouthful of a name and a brutal death metal sound to match — dense, merciless, and technically ferocious, staking out their corner of New York's underground with immediate ferocity.

Oregon's Henbane Chariot evoke the poisonous plant that shares their name — a black metal act born in 2021 with a sound that is murky, hallucinatory, and laced with something deeply unwholesome. Dark folk undertones lurk beneath the blasting.

California's Henry Metal is a solo heavy metal project launched in 2017 that leans into earnest, guitar-forward songwriting with a classicist sensibility. Unpretentious and unabashedly rooted in the riff.

Boston's Hepatagua have been plying their trade in sludge metal since 2013, bringing the Northeast's particular strain of urban heaviness to a genre that thrives on misery and low tuning. Dense, slow, and corrosive in all the right ways.