Los Angeles-based Swartwoud has operated since 2013 at the intersection of black metal, sludge, and crust punk, with an ambient undercurrent running through their abrasive, lo-fi recordings.

California's Swine Infection blends black metal and crust punk into a raw, anarchic sound, active since 2012 and rooted in the lo-fi, DIY tradition common to both genres.

Black/death metal band from Hawthorne, California, formed in 2012, combining the rawness of black metal with the brutality of death metal in the tradition of South Bay extreme metal.

Synrah is an industrial symphonic death/black metal band from Norco, California, formed in 2013, blending orchestral grandeur with mechanized heaviness and extreme metal aggression into a densely layered sound.

Torrance, California's Teeth Gnashers have been grinding out raw black metal fused with punk aggression since 2009, one of the longer-running acts in LA's subterranean extreme scene. Their black/punk hybrid strips both genres down to their most feral essentials — speed, scorn, and maximum filth.

Formed in San Diego in 2023, Terminating Death are among the newer voices in the city's underground, working the intersection of blackened sludge and doom metal with a sense of controlled devastation. Their sound layers black metal's corrosive atmosphere over sludge's lumbering heaviness — slow, dark, and entirely uninterested in accessibility.

Coming out of the Norwalk/Whittier corridor in Los Angeles County, TerrorStorm have been running their black/thrash/speed metal assault since 2015, part of a thriving Southern California scene that has never stopped producing bands with this much raw velocity. They play with the reckless momentum of old Sodom and Bathory translated through the LA underground's obsession with analog aggression and total sonic attack.

Formed in 2024, Thanatotherion are among the newest voices in black metal's ever-expanding underground, the name itself — Greek for "beast of death" — staking a claim to the darkest corners of the tradition. Their approach is rooted in orthodox black metal's cold grammar, built for listeners who want the atmosphere of the void without unnecessary embellishment.

The Haunting Presence emerged from California in 2012 as a project straddling the jagged boundary between black and death metal, pursuing a sound that is at once cavernous and suffocating. Their approach leans into the murky, atmosphere-heavy end of death/black fusion — dense, dissonant, and deliberately unsettling. It's music that sounds like it was dragged up from somewhere dark and left just barely intact.