San Diego's Wormskull have been crawling through a gutter of black metal and punk since 2011, building a sound that deliberately strips the genre down to something raw and street-level. Rather than pursuing the atmospheric or symphonic ends of black metal, they lean toward the primitivism that connects the genre's roots to hardcore punk's confrontational energy.

Wrath of Logarius formed in San Francisco, California, having evolved from the project Martyr Logarius, and signed with Season of Mist ahead of their 2023 EP Necrotic Assimilation. The band describes their approach as "formless black metal," navigating between raw black metal, brutal death metal, and post-metal textures without settling into a fixed genre identity. Named after the boss character from the video game Bloodborne, the project earned early attention for its layered and eerie compositional sensibility within the Season of Mist underground division.

Los Angeles avant-garde black metal duo formed in 2017, notable for replacing conventional guitar with grand piano as the primary instrument alongside drums and shrieked vocals. The result is a genuinely strange, dissonant take on black metal that sounds like nothing else in the California underground.

Los Angeles black metal newcomers Wyrmtongue launched in 2024, bringing a harsh and uncompromising approach to the genre from within one of North America's most unlikely metal hubs. Their presence in the LA underground signals an interest in bleakness and extremity over the city's more polished heavy fare.