Named after a shrieking specter from Slavic folklore, Cleveland's Drekavac have been conjuring raw, unpolished black metal since 2013. Their recordings lean into the lo-fi aesthetic that defines the raw black metal underground — cold production, relentless aggression, and an uncompromising hostility toward accessibility.

Cleveland's Druparia formed in 2020 at the intersection of melodic death metal's harmonic ambition and metalcore's structural intensity, with pure death metal brutality keeping either tendency from going soft. The band reflects a generation of Cleveland heavy acts comfortable pulling from multiple extreme subgenres simultaneously without losing coherence.

Findlay, Ohio's Ebullism takes the technical death metal template and applies it with clinical precision, a 2020-formed act that favors surgical complexity over brute force, even when those two things end up sounding the same.

Dayton, Ohio's Ejaculating Rektal Squid Pussy commits fully to the brutality of goregrind and brutal death metal, a project formed in 2022 with no pretense toward subtlety. Cavernous gurgles, blast beats, and maximum grotesquerie.

Ohio's Elusive Travel have been moving at doom/death's agonizingly deliberate pace since 2001, letting despair accumulate bar by bar — one of the longer-running acts in a subgenre that rewards patience with weight.

Cleveland's Embalmer carry on with the straightforward death metal tradition that has always suited Ohio's no-frills underground. Since 2016, they've delivered unadorned, morgue-scented brutality without pretense.

Columbus, Ohio's Encenathrakh dismantle death metal from the inside out, fusing avant-garde dissonance with technical brutal ferocity into something genuinely unsettling. Since 2013, they've occupied a singular, confrontational space at the extreme edge of the genre.

Dayton's Engraved Darkness draws on the bleakest traditions of black and death metal, weaving cold dissonance and sepulchral atmosphere into a sound that feels excavated from the Ohio underground.

Cedarville, Ohio's Enslaved has been grinding out thrash-inflected death metal since 1992, representing the persistence of Midwest extreme metal through decades of shifts in the underground landscape.