Cincinnati's Citizen X traffic in groove-driven thrash built on thick mid-paced riffs and a blue-collar Midwestern intensity. Their material locks hard into the pocket before erupting into fast-lane aggression.

Columbus experimental black/thrash act Citranomicon approach genre boundaries as suggestions, welding cold tremolo-picked fury to unconventional structures and a genuinely strange sonic imagination. They resist easy categorization.

Cleveland crossover/thrash outfit Civil Disobedience fuse the raw energy of hardcore punk with thrash's technical precision, built for maximum impact in small, sweaty venues. They represent the Ohio underground at its most combative.

Cleveland heavy metal act Clifford Meyer operates in the sturdy tradition of Ohio blue-collar metal, offering straightforward riff-driven material with earnest conviction. Their work sits in the classic mold of American heavy metal without pretension.

Dayton, Ohio's Close the Hatch have been building their atmospheric doom-post-metal sound since 2011, occupying a sonic space where Electric Wizard's psychedelic weight meets the post-metal grandeur of Neurosis. Their 2020 album Modern Witchcraft, released on Red Moth Records, stands as one of their most fully realized statements.

Cincinnati's Clouded merge grindcore's speed with sludge metal's suffocating weight, drawing from a web of overlapping Ohio underground projects. Their early releases, including a 2016 split with Ethicist, showcase a band comfortable in filth.

Cloudkicker is the solo project of Columbus, Ohio-based guitarist Ben Sharp, a commercial airline pilot who has released instrumental post-metal and djent music under that alias since 2007. Sharp composes, records, and engineers everything himself, and has distributed all releases as pay-what-you-want downloads under Creative Commons licensing, amassing an unusually large following for a DIY studio project. His breakthrough album Beacons arrived in 2010, and a short touring run in 2014 with Intronaut as a backing band marked his only live performances.

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.

New Philadelphia, Ohio's Concussion batter listeners with heads-down thrash metal, relying on precise riff mechanics and relentless tempo to inflict maximum sonic damage.