Kalmex and the Riffmerchants

Full of Hell are an American grindcore/powerviolence band from Ocean City, Maryland and central Pennsylvania (formed 2009) whose relentless fast-attack extremity is laced with harsh noise, power electronics and free-skronk saxophone. Vocalist Dylan Walker's electronics push the band well beyond grind, a tendency made explicit through collaborations with Merzbow, The Body, Primitive Man and shoegazers Nothing. They fold sludge and death-metal weight into a prolific, boundary-pushing discography.

Split Cranium is a trans-Atlantic crust/d-beat/hardcore punk project pairing American musician Aaron Turner (Isis, Sumac, Mamiffer) with Finnish musician Jussi Lehtisalo (Circle). Lehtisalo and Turner conceived the band during Circle's 2009 European tour with Isis, with Lehtisalo writing riffs and Turner adding vocals, guitar, and noise. Their self-titled debut arrived on Hydra Head Records on March 20, 2012, followed by the more experimental "I'm the Devil and I'm OK" on Ipecac Recordings on May 25, 2018. Turner has described the dynamic as "Jussi loves melody and I love dissonance and noise."

Old Man Gloom is an experimental sludge/post-metal supergroup formed in 1999 in Santa Fe, New Mexico by Aaron Turner (Isis) and drummer Santos Montano, later expanding with musicians from the Boston hardcore and metalcore scene. Their music juxtaposes crushing sludge and hardcore with noise, drone, and ambient soundscapes. Bassist/vocalist Caleb Scofield died in a car accident in March 2018; Stephen Brodsky, his Cave In bandmate, subsequently joined the band. Their albums have appeared on labels including Hydra Head Records (and its Tortuga imprint), founded by Aaron Turner, as well as Profound Lore.

Anaal Nathrakh are Mick Kenney and Dave Hunt, a Birmingham duo who spent twenty-five years making the most punishing record they could and then adding the thing that shouldn't fit. The frame is grindcore speed under black metal shrieking, but the drums are programmed and the production is deliberately mechanical — reviewers of The Codex Necro (2001) describe a wall of noise built from 'insanely fast-mechanized drums' and 'a remorseless sense of industrial coldness'. Over the albums that followed, Hunt started laying enormous clean choruses over the blast beats and orchestral samples crept in behind them, so a track can move from digital-hardcore ugliness to something close to anthemic without ever slowing down. They publish no lyrics, describe themselves as apolitical, and have kept Napalm Death's Shane Embury on live bass for years — a band whose extremity has never had anything to do with the politics that usually travel with it.

Zozobra is an American sludge/post-metal band conceived in 2006 by bassist-vocalist Caleb Scofield (Cave In, Old Man Gloom), taking its name from the giant effigy burned annually at the Fiestas de Santa Fe in New Mexico. It gave Scofield his first outlet to write his own songs, and its debut album Harmonic Tremors (2007) featured Old Man Gloom drummer Santos Montano; the band toured the U.S. with Isis and Jesu in early 2007. Later releases Bird of Prey (2008, with Aaron Harris of Isis on drums) and Savage Masters (2013) followed, with the project ending after Scofield's death in 2018.

Zeni Geva are a Japanese noise-rock band formed in Tokyo in 1987 by guitarist-vocalist KK Null (Kazuyuki Kishino), built on brutal, minimalist, detuned riff-machines and Null's harsh electronics. Steve Albini produced their 1991 album Total Castration and performed on the 1993 live document All Right You Little Bastards, and Jello Biafra released them on Alternative Tentacles; their 2001 album 10,000 Light Years appeared on Neurosis's Neurot Recordings. The long-running trio settled around Null, Ruins drummer Tatsuya Yoshida, and (for over two decades) guitarist Mitsuru Tabata.

The Canyon Observer are a Slovenian quintet formed in 2011 whose experimental post-metal fuses black metal, noise, doom and sludge with delicate atmospheric passages into something 'chaotic, deranged and powerfully disorienting'. Across the FVCK (2015) and NØLL (2018) LPs on Kapa Records they alternate crushing heaviness with hallucinatory atmosphere, staged live amid fog and strobes. Their experimentalism lives largely in noise and genre-collapse rather than any single exotic ingredient.

Gigantic Brain is a Virginia-based cybergrind project started by John Brown in the early 2000s as one-man, drum-machine-powered electronic grindcore, later expanded into a duo with producer/multi-instrumentalist Mastin Simmons in 2012. Wikipedia credits it as 'one of the original pioneers of the cybergrind subgenre,' with a catalog running from chaotic, densely layered electronic grind (The Invasion Discography, 2004) toward the industrial/doom/ambient-leaning textures of the 2016 self-titled album. Released mostly through Razorback Records and Grindcore Karaoke, with absurdist lyrical themes layered over extremely dense production.

Dead Cross is a Southern California crossover-thrash/hardcore supergroup formed in late 2015, uniting drummer Dave Lombardo (Slayer, Fantômas, Mr. Bungle), bassist Justin Pearson (The Locust, Retox), and guitarist Michael Crain (Retox). The Locust's Gabe Serbian was the original vocalist but left after the debut was recorded; Mike Patton replaced him in December 2016, rewriting the vocals over the existing instrumentals. The band has released two albums via Patton's Ipecac Recordings — the self-titled debut (2017) and II (2022) — delivering short, violent blasts of thrash and hardcore punk.

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Nailbomb was an industrial-thrash side project formed in 1993 by Max Cavalera, then frontman of Sepultura, and English musician Alex Newport of Fudge Tunnel, welding grinding industrial metal and thrash to crust punk and sludge. Their lone studio album, Point Blank (Roadrunner, 1994), was cut largely by the duo with session help from Sepultura bandmates Igor Cavalera (drums) and Andreas Kisser (guitar) plus Fear Factory's Dino Cazares. The band played only a warm-up show and a set at the 1995 Dynamo Open Air Festival, documented on the live album Proud to Commit Commercial Suicide, before disbanding; its harsh, sample-laced attack became a cult touchstone of 90s extreme metal.

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