Buffalo's Tar Bucket crawled out of the Erie lakeshore in 2024 with a sludge metal approach as dense and unmoving as their name implies. Still early in their existence, they traffic in slow-cooked punishment — downtuned guitars dragged through mud and distortion, the way only a city with winters that long could produce.

Brooklyn's Thera Roya traffic in heavy, slow-burning sludge and post-metal, building suffocating walls of sound from a base in New York City's underground scene since 2013. Their music favors atmosphere and weight over speed, with extended compositions that grind and drift in equal measure.

Brooklyn's Tidal Bore arrived in 2022 with a sound that smears death metal aggression across a sludge-coated frame, favoring punishing tempos that occasionally collapse into murky, caustic slowdowns. They capture the abrasive confrontationalism of the current NYC underground.

Twin Lords is a grindcore and sludge metal band from Ithaca, New York, formed in 2012, merging the short, brutal blasts of grindcore with the thick, lurching weight of sludge metal into a punishing hybrid sound.

Two Minutes Hate is a sludge and stoner metal band from Rochester, New York, formed in 2022, channeling the dense, distortion-heavy sound of sludge metal alongside the grooving psychedelic undertones of stoner rock.