Dayton's Cheap Gas smashes black metal, crust punk, and grindcore into a filthy, high-speed collision that prioritizes ferocity and brevity above all else. Their sound is as blunt and unrefined as the industrial Midwestern city they come from.

Cincinnati, Ohio crust-punk and death metal band Coelacanth have been grinding out ferocious, politically charged metal since the early 1990s, earning a cult following in the American underground. Their sound fuses the rawness of crust with the brutality of early death metal.

Columbus duo fusing abrasive crust punk with primitive black metal into something genuinely ugly and confrontational. Short, caustic bursts of noise that leave no room for comfort.

Columbus, Ohio's Erthbrnr began in the chaos of hardcore and crust punk before migrating toward a darker, heavier convergence of black metal, death metal, and sludge. Over more than a decade the band has undergone a genuine stylistic evolution, using each phase as both rejection and extension of the one before.

This Ohio band operate in the dirty crossover territory between sludge metal and crust punk, piling on thick, down-tuned riffs with the filthy, grinding ethos of the crust underground.

Toledo, Ohio's Męka fuse black metal's rawness with crust punk's d-beat fury and political charge, a combination that has made them one of the more distinctive acts in the region since 2017. The Polish name — meaning torment or suffering — fits a sound designed to be both abrasive and relentless.

Cleveland's Pillärс (stylized with an umlaut and a grimace) combines crust punk's political bite with doom and sludge's crushing tempo, forging music as heavy as the city's industrial legacy demands.

Rust Belt Sludge Punk from the hills of Southern Ohio.

Columbus, Ohio grindcore and death metal band formed in 2016, fusing the genre's velocity and crust punk's anarchic rawness with death metal's low-end devastation. Rooted in Columbus's scrappy DIY underground, Voice of Crows produce music with both political sharpness and physical force, treating brevity and brutality as equally essential tools.