Cincinnati's Desensitized arrived in 2020 with a death/thrash hybrid that channels the ferocity of both traditions without splitting the difference — the thrash is aggressive and fast, the death metal influence dark and heavy. The Queen City has a long metal heritage, and Desensitized keep it in violent good health.

Columbus, Ohio's Devour have been feeding on straightforward, unembellished death metal since 2013. They operate in the tradition of Midwestern death metal — grinding, no-nonsense, and loyal to the genre's core values of brutality and precision.

Grafton, Ohio's Disembodied have been delivering brutal death metal since 2019, carving out their sound in the working-class industrial corridor between Cleveland and Columbus. Their approach is unsparing — blasting, guttural, and built for the kind of listener who measures heaviness in tonnage.

Columbus, Ohio's Disfigurement have been crafting punishment in the brutal death metal and slam tradition since 2012, wielding the dense, pulverizing riff architecture that defines the Midwest's underground death scene. Their approach leans heavily on the slamming breakdowns and guttural extremity of the slam subgenre, built to level the pit and leave nothing standing.

Drawn and Quartered have been one of Ohio's most steadfast purveyors of old-school death metal since their formation in Sidney in 1999, building a legacy on punishing riffs and an uncompromising devotion to the genre's most sepulchral traditions. Their sound reaches back to the early-nineties death metal underground — cavernous, malevolent, and utterly without mercy. Decades into their existence they remain a band that refuses to modernize, treating death metal as a living covenant rather than a nostalgic exercise.

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.