Cleveland, Ohio's Tortuary operates in classic death metal territory, drawing on the Rust Belt's blue-collar brutality to deliver stripped-down, no-frills extreme metal.

Ohio brutal death metal and grindcore act formed in 2020, dealing in short, violent bursts of distorted noise with the surgical precision of death metal riffing beneath the chaos. Their name does not oversell the filth.

Progressive death metal band from Toledo, Ohio, active since 2013, combining the technical ambition of progressive metal with the aggression and heaviness of death metal.

Cleveland's Vicar Blood arrived in 2025 dragging the rot-soaked tradition of Midwest death metal behind them like a corpse. Unholy in name and uncompromising in execution, they channel the rust-belt grimness of their city into suffocating, grave-deep brutality.

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.

Formed in Cleveland in 2021, Voices of the Damned fuse the punishing weight of death metal with groove metal's rhythmic swagger, building songs around thick, locked-in riffs and a relentless sense of momentum. The Cleveland scene's blue-collar aggression runs through everything they do, grounding the brutality in something physical and immediate. They're a young band arriving fully formed.

Columbus, Ohio band weaving Gothic gloom into melodic death metal, pairing the melancholic atmosphere of the Gothic tradition with driving riffs and death metal aggression. Active since 2022, they occupy the darkly romantic space between mid-era Paradise Lost and Scandinavian melodeath.

Cleveland's Witchery are a death metal outfit active since 2011, drawing on the city's long and storied tradition of heavy underground music. Cleveland has produced some of the American Midwest's most unforgiving metal, and this band slots into that lineage with no-frills death metal built for aggression over atmosphere. The shared Bandcamp handle with their Arizona namesake makes them easy to confuse, but the death metal pedigree here is distinctly its own.