What is now proved was once only imagin'd.William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
One rule governs this list and it is not negotiable: two albums or fewer. Not two decades of records with a recent one on top, not a veteran band with a new singer, not a side project made of men who already have careers. Eight bands, none of them holding more than a pair of full lengths, all of them still at the stage where the next record could go anywhere.
The rule matters because the word new gets abused in this genre worse than anywhere else. A band with six albums and a hot review is not new, it is established and briefly fashionable, and lists that mix the two are useless to the reader who wants to get in early. Two records is the exact point at which a band has proved it can do the thing twice and has not yet decided what it is for. That is the interesting window, and it is short.
The economy that makes this possible, the small labels, the tapes and the mail order that never went away, is the subject of the chapter on the modern underground. Here are eight bands currently working inside it.
The ones who let progressive rock back in
Bedsore came out of Rome in 2018 and put Hypnagogic Hallucinations on 20 Buck Spin on 24 July 2020, a debut with organ, clean passages, tempo changes that arrive without warning and a colour palette no death metal band had used in thirty years. Dreaming the Strife for Love followed in 2024 on the same label and abandoned most of the remaining constraints. Two albums, and already nobody can say with confidence what the third one will sound like.
Musicians who have played in Atheist and Cruciamentum put Ancient Death together in Massachusetts, and the pedigree tells you the two poles their 2025 debut Ego Dissolution works between: rhythmic writing that will not settle, and a low end borrowed from the caverns. A first album that gets mentioned in the same breath as bands five records deep is a rare thing, and this one earned it.
The ones who came up through the hardcore rooms
Vomit Forth are from Connecticut and they play like it. Seething Malevolence in 2021 was blunt and short, and Terrified of God, released by Century Media on 11 October 2024 and produced and mixed by Randy LeBeouf, is the same band with better weapons: mid tempo, ugly, closer to a hardcore set than to a death metal album in shape while remaining death metal in every other respect.
Kruelty do the Japanese version and they may be the most physically heavy band on this page. Formed in Tokyo in 2017, they released Untopia on 17 March 2023, their second album, on Profound Lore, and toured Europe on the back of it. What they have found is the exact overlap between beatdown hardcore and Swedish death doom, a space perhaps four bands have ever occupied, and they occupy it without either half sounding like a guest.
Two records is the exact point at which a band has proved it can do the thing twice and has not yet decided what it is for.
The ones working in the filth
Phobophilic released Enveloping Absurdity on 16 September 2022 through Prosthetic, a North Dakota band with a considerably better record than that sentence suggests: thick, mid paced, with the riffs stacked rather than sequenced, and lyrics that lean on Camus, Sartre and Nietzsche without ever announcing it on the sleeve. One album so far, and a split seven inch with the next band on this list.
Sedimentum come from Quebec, sing in French, and put Suppuration morphogénésiaque out on Memento Mori on 25 July 2022. Death metal in French is rare enough to be a statement in itself, and the band uses it properly: the vocal phrasing sits differently against the riff because the language does, which is a real musical consequence rather than a novelty. Everything they have released is short, wet and unpleasant in the correct way.
The two second albums that changed the argument
Vacuous are from London and their trajectory is the clearest of the eight. An EP called Katabasis in 2020, then Dreams of Dysphoria on 14 October 2022, issued in Europe by Me Saco Un Ojo and on compact disc by Dark Descent, and then In His Blood on Relapse on 28 February 2025. Three years from a tape label to Relapse. The music is atmospheric without being weightless and angular without being fussy, and the second record is a clear improvement on a debut that was already good.
Castrator matter for a second reason and it is worth saying plainly rather than dressing it up. An all female death metal band with two albums on a serious label is not a novelty item and should not be written about as one. The records stand or fall on the riffs, and these ones stand.
What the eight have in common
Set them side by side and the striking thing is a negative. Not one of these bands sounds like a revival band. They all take the old production values as settled, the way a photographer takes film stock as settled, and then spend their attention entirely on the writing, which is exactly the thing the first wave of the revival was worst at. Nobody here is proving they know what a 1991 record sounded like. That argument was won a decade ago and these bands inherited the result.
The second thing they share is the size of the operation behind them. A first album on a label whose whole catalogue would fit in one shelving unit, a pressing in the low thousands, a tour booked out of somebody's inbox between shifts, and an audience assembled one order at a time. That is the same machine the underground has been running since the tape trading years, and the only part of it that has changed is the speed of the post.
The eight, at a glance
| Band | Where from | Records so far | Start here |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bedsore | Italy | Two | Hypnagogic Hallucinations (2020) |
| Vomit Forth | United States | Two | Terrified of God (2024) |
| Phobophilic | United States | One | Enveloping Absurdity (2022) |
| Sedimentum | Canada | One | Suppuration morphogénésiaque (2022) |
| Vacuous | United Kingdom | Two | In His Blood (2025) |
| Kruelty | Japan | Two | Untopia (2023) |
| Castrator | International | Two | Coronation of the Grotesque (2025) |
| Ancient Death | United States | One | Ego Dissolution (2025) |
Look at the third column and then at the second. Eight bands, six countries, and not one of them needed a domestic industry to exist. The Quebec band and the Tokyo band and the London band are all reaching the same buyer by the same route, and the route costs a small label a few hundred pounds to build.
The honest caveat, because a list like this always needs one: some of these bands will not make a third record. That is the arithmetic of the form and always has been, and it is not a reason to wait. Buy the record while the band is still deciding what it is. The rest of the field they are working in, the labels and the tapes and the several thousand bands nobody has written about yet, is underground death metal.
