Utica, New York's Half Dead arrived in 2022 with a mission to play straightforward, ugly death metal without pretense. What they lack in history they make up for in sheer downtuned brutality.

Rochester, New York's Halothane approach melodic and progressive death metal with the methodical focus the genre demands, weaving technical ambition into compositions that never lose their emotional thread. Active since 2019.

New York's Headless Eyes occupy an unusually broad corner of extreme metal, blending death, thrash, and traditional heavy metal into a sound that refuses easy categorization. Formed in 2020, they draw on the full timeline of heavy music and synthesize it into something with its own jagged shape.

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.

New York's Heretic Bodyhammer arrived in 2022 with a death metal attack that the name describes better than most press releases could — blunt, aggressive, and deliberately mechanical in its devastation. They hit like the instrument in question.

From Saugerties, New York, Hexe Krieg weaponize the convergence of thrash, death, and speed metal into something relentlessly kinetic. Since 2012 the band has pursued a style that is as mechanically aggressive as it is single-minded in purpose.

New York's Humanity Falls have been dissecting death metal and grindcore through an experimental lens since 2009, treating tempo, structure, and brutality as variables rather than constants. Technical, disorienting, and genuinely unsettling.

New York's Hung take the melodic and progressive side of death metal seriously, building dense, shifting compositions since 2014 that reward repeated listens. Technically ambitious without losing sight of the riff.

Buffalo's Immolated keeps death metal's founding principles intact: grinding riffs, unrelenting rhythms, and an aesthetic that owes nothing to trends — a decade-plus of underground devotion.