New York's Darkside NYC have been a fixture of the city's crossover underground since 1992, blending streetwise hardcore grit with thrash metal velocity in a sound that refuses to mellow with age.

Rochester's DarkStarr carry the torch for classic heavy metal songcraft, delivering hook-driven riffs and soaring vocals in a tradition that owes as much to the NWOBHM as to the hard rock clubs of upstate New York.

Syracuse grindcore act Dasein take their name from Heidegger's concept of human existence, then promptly obliterate any philosophical calm with blastbeat-driven bursts of noise and fury since forming in 2021.

New York melodic death metal act Daughter Chaos balance harmonic elegance against a gnashing rhythmic core, crafting songs since 2020 that treat dissonance and melody as equal partners in the same violent conversation.

Albany, New York's Dawn of the Hero have been delivering punishing metalcore since 2010, building a reputation for live intensity in a region with deep roots in the genre. Their music leans into the anthemic end of the spectrum — big hooks behind bigger breakdowns.

Rochester, New York's Day of the Locust take a more traditional approach to heavy metal, favoring the stripped-down power of riff-driven songwriting over extremity. Formed in 2016, they represent a pocket of the Rust Belt underground that still believes in classic metal's lasting force.

New York's Dead Baby deal in stripped-down, confrontational death metal with no interest in genre refinement or commercial appeal — just raw, skull-rattling brutality that the state's extreme metal underground has always nurtured.

Rochester's Dead Bitch smear black metal's corrosive atmosphere across a sludge metal backbone, producing something uglier and more dissonant than either genre achieves alone. Since 2016, they've been one of upstate New York's most confrontational live acts.

Brooklyn's Dead Corpse grind and pummel through a potent mix of grindcore velocity and death metal savagery — a combination well suited to New York City's loud, overcrowded, and relentlessly competitive underground scene.