California's Shadows of Depression arrived in 2025 with depressive black metal as their vehicle — long, suffocating compositions built around self-annihilation and emotional desolation. New to the scene but working within a well-mapped subgenre, their output leans hard into DSBM's characteristic minimalism and despair.

California's Shataan began as a black metal project in 2024 before incorporating folk and psychedelic elements — a trajectory their Metal Archives genre description openly acknowledges — making them a rare act willing to move between kvlt severity and earthy, exploratory rock. The combination suggests a project more interested in evolution than genre loyalty.

Sacramento raw black metal project that surfaced in 2024, embracing the deliberately primitive, corrosive production aesthetic of the raw black metal underground with unfiltered menace.

California's Shield Roar operates in the shadowed space where black metal meets ambient texture, using cold riffs and expansive soundscapes to create an atmospheric and isolating listening experience since 2020.

San Clemente, California's Shit Wizard merges black and death metal with a nihilistic, lo-fi edge, building a reputation in the Southern California underground for unfiltered, filthy extreme metal since 2012.

San Diego's Shrieking, formed in 2025, operate in the atmospheric and depressive wing of black metal, crafting bleak, suffocating soundscapes that lean into introspection and emotional desolation over aggression.

San Diego blackened sludge metal band formed in 2023, fusing black metal's corrosive malice with sludge's thick, punishing low-end into a suffocating and visceral sound.

A Los Angeles black metal project formed in 2025, Silent Thunder operates in ambient black metal territory — the kind of expansive, atmospheric sound that trades raw ferocity for long, immersive passages built more on texture and tension than speed.

Sacramento's Silvara have been fusing death, black, and thrash metal since 2012, crafting a three-way hybrid that takes the California death scene's heaviness, layered it with black metal darkness, and sharpened the whole thing with thrash's instinct for the riff.