Plebeian Grandstand

Skin Tension is a Nashville, Tennessee experimental duo of Joshua D. Byrd and Edward Longo, working across avant-garde metal, dissonant black metal, mathcore, and free improvisation. Their sprawling discography, including the 27-hour, 131-track compilation Omni, mixes noise, ambient textures, jazz, and glitch electronics with metal aggression. The 2023 album Celebrant marked the project's first fully composed release after years of improvisation-based recording, made at their home studio The Valley of Defilement in Nashville.

Ploughshare is a Canberra, Australia black/death metal trio-turned-collective that folds industrial electronics, noise rock, and jazz-inflected bass work into long, dissonant compositions. Their 2024 album Second Wound (Brilliant Emperor/I, Voidhanger) was praised for pushing further into warped electronic textures and technical death metal complexity while retaining the project's blast-driven black/death core.

One-man experimental black metal/noise/dark-ambient project from Arlington, Virginia, active since the mid-2000s, self-releasing a run of CDs before signing to Flingco Sound System for Oneiromantical War (2008) and Myrmidon (2009). The project layers dense, guitar-driven noise with buried vocals and programmed drums, veering between thrash-punk combustion and extended dark-ambient passages; reviewers note closing tracks that build from acoustic beginnings into twenty-minute noise excursions.

The solo, day-to-day-reality-grounded counterpart project of Dallas, TX multi-instrumentalist Garry Brents (also of Cara Neir and Gonemage), formed 2021. Tagged Avant-garde Black Metal / Grindcore on Metal Archives, Homeskin is built around rapid, often sub-24-hour recording sessions, intentional tape-wobbling production, and a hazy, melancholic take on black metal shot through with post-hardcore, screamo and noise-rock influences. Brents deliberately ended the project at its 17th release, 'End's Daze Without Organs,' after a self-imposed 15-month arc.

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Tabernacle ov Thee Flesh is a Brazilian avant-garde/experimental black metal project from Joinville, released via Ultra Gash Records, featuring Naboth E. Coli (vocals, keyboards), L. Borgia Rossetti (guitar, also of Esmectatons and Os Legais) and Leal Barroso (drums, also of Esmectatons and Zombie Cookbook). Their sole album Versículos de Autoflagelo (2021) comprises 25 short tracks forming one continuous suite steeped in free improvisation, jazz and noise traditions.

Ex Eye are an instrumental NYC quartet formed in 2016, led by experimental saxophonist Colin Stetson with Greg Fox (Liturgy) on drums, Shahzad Ismaily (Secret Chiefs 3, Ceramic Dog) on synth and Toby Summerfield on guitar. Grown out of Stetson's Gorecki-reimagining sessions, they fuse black metal's hypnotic repetition and blast beats with free-jazz saxophone and drone, releasing a self-titled debut on Relapse Records in 2017. It is one of the more successful jazz-metal syntheses of its era.

NekRock is a one-person Russian (Moscow-based) avant-garde/electronic metal project, self-described as 'avant-aesthetique,' fusing cybergrind, black metal, and harsh noise with trance, house, and jazz elements.

White Moth is a one-off 2010 studio collective assembled by Pyramids' R. Loren, splicing black-metal guitar churn, digital-hardcore breakbeats, no-wave saxophone, and musique-concrete textures into a single dense suite. The guest roster (Colin Marston, Sam Hillmer, Alec Empire, Lydia Lunch, Dälek, Christoph Heemann, Jacob Kirkegaard) reads like a cross-section of the American and European experimental underground rather than a touring band. It sits closer to a curated art-collaboration than a genre act, but its metal-guitar/electronics collision earns its avant-garde-metal chart placement.

Nirrti is a solo psychedelic black metal project based in Orlová, Czechia, signed to Depressive Illusions Records. The project's music has been described as eerie, dissonant, and 'progressive black metal played through the lens of psychedelics and jazz,' aiming to convey darkness, uncertainty, and glimpses of other dimensions rather than adhering to traditional black metal norms. Releases include 'Psychonautix' (2022), 'Palindromos' (2023), and 'Cyberpsychosis' (2024), the latter continuing the project's cyber/psychedelic conceptual throughline.

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.