Formed in 2025 in Bozeman, Montana, Melted Eyes represent something rare in death metal: a band emerging from a landscape more associated with wilderness than metal scenes, channeling that geographic isolation into a sound that feels genuinely removed from any obvious metropolitan influence. Their approach to death metal leans into brutality and atmosphere equally, suggesting a project built from the ground up with little concern for trend or precedent. Bozeman is not a city that produces death metal acts often, which makes the existence of Melted Eyes all the more striking.

Aurora, Illinois gave birth to Melting Rot in 2025, a grindcore outfit that wastes no time and shows no mercy. Short songs, maximum punishment — their grindcore is rooted in the classic tradition of brevity as brutality, weaponizing speed and noise against any expectation of melody or restraint. Aurora sits in Chicago's orbit, and that industrial midwest grit runs through Melting Rot's aesthetic like a live wire.

The Melvins, led by the inimitable Buzz Osborne and powerhouse drummer Dale Crover, are one of the most prolific and influential bands in heavy music history, having helped birth both grunge and sludge metal from their origins in Montesano, Washington. Their early work directly influenced Nirvana, Soundgarden, and the entire Pacific Northwest heavy scene, while their restless experimentation across 30+ studio albums has touched on everything from drone metal to punk rock to noise pop. Defiantly uncommercial yet universally respected, the Melvins exist as a singular, irreducible force in underground music.

Woodland, California's Memento Mori have spent over a decade — since 2012 — navigating the uncomfortable space where progressive ambition collides with death metal's most destructive impulses. They construct songs of genuine compositional depth without sanding away the aggression that makes death metal viscerally compelling, threading technical passages through punishing rhythmic slabs. It is a balance many bands attempt and few achieve with the kind of coherent vision Memento Mori have developed across their catalog.

please update this band

Brooklyn death metal veterans Memorial Gore have been at it since 2013, building a catalog steeped in the Old School traditions that the New York underground has long revered — caveman riffing, sepulchral production, and a relentless forward momentum that references the genre's early 90s peak without feeling like mere nostalgia. New York City's death metal lineage is one of the most storied in the genre, and Memorial Gore fit naturally into that lineage while carving out their own particular brand of brutality. They remain one of Brooklyn's more consistent and uncompromising death metal exports.

Hard-hitting Metalcore from Weatherford.

Denton metalcore with anthemic hooks and aggressive breakdowns. One of the biggest metalcore bands to come out of Texas.

From Albuquerque, New Mexico, Mendacium have been forging blackened death metal since 2017 in one of the American Southwest's more isolated metal scenes, and that geographic remove is audible in the music — a rawness and arid hostility that mirrors the high desert terrain. Their death/black hybrid leans into the darkness native to both genres, blending the blasting intensity of death metal with black metal's corrosive, atmospheric venom. Few cities produce extreme metal quite like Albuquerque does, and Mendacium stand as one of the scene's sharper exports.