Out of Antioch, California since 2015, Demonsmoke drag sludge and doom metal through the Bay Area's grimy underbelly, building suffocating walls of distortion laced with a toxic, crawling menace. Their music has the slow-motion fury of sludge's hardcore roots married to doom's infinite, oppressive descent.

Santa Clarita's Desolate Solitude arrived in 2023 playing funeral doom — the most extreme end of the slow-metal spectrum, where tempo is abandoned entirely in favor of mass and atmosphere. Even by the genre's standards their music is unhurried, built from extended passages of overwhelming grief.

Los Angeles-based Dowager has been building doom and sludge monoliths since 2014, a fitting project for a city where everything from the traffic to the smog seems to move at a funeral pace. Their sound carries the sprawling, oppressive weight of L.A.'s vastness — slow tempos, massive guitar tones, and a sludge-influenced abrasion that keeps the prettiness of doom metal from becoming comfortable. There's a distinctly urban ugliness to their sound, music made in and for a city that grinds people down.

Fremont's Druid surfaced in 2018 playing doom and stoner metal with a California haze built into every riff — slow-rolling tempos, fuzz-heavy tones, and an emphasis on hypnotic groove over urgency. The Bay Area underground has long supported this kind of deliberate, weight-focused heavy music, and Druid fits naturally into that lineage.

Santa Cruz, California's Dvvell emerged in 2022 with a sound rooted in the heaviest end of sludge and doom — plodding tempos, down-tuned guitar tone, and a suffocating atmosphere that rewards patience from the listener.

A recently formed Oakland, California band, Dwel draws equally from sludge, doom, and post-metal's expansive sonic vocabulary, building dense, slow-burning compositions that owe as much to atmosphere as they do to raw heaviness.