San Diego's Hair of the Bear conjure the sun-baked, fuzz-soaked side of stoner doom — riffs that sprawl as wide as the Pacific and drag just as deep. Formed in 2018, they've built a hazy, heavy catalog that owes as much to desert rock as it does to doom.

Pasadena's Half Moon Codex operate at the intersection of sludge, drone, and doom — long-form compositions that move with the patience of tectonic plates and the weight to match. Formed in 2018, they're a fixture in the Southern California heavy underground.

San Diego's Hanging Garden have cultivated a strain of depressive black metal since 2013 that leans heavily into isolation and despair, letting long, suffocating passages take root in the mind.

California stoner/doom outfit Hawnt deal in slow, narcotic riffs draped in reverb and psychedelic haze, the kind of music that turns a room dim and heavy. Active since 2015, their approach leans into the occult-tinged desert rock lineage without losing its own ghostly character.

Chico, California's Hearses combine drone, sludge, and doom into a crushing slow-motion procession built from sustained dissonance and mountainous low-end pressure. Since 2021 they've inhabited the unhurried, suffocating space where all three genres converge.

California's Heathendom formed in 2025 as a symphonic black metal project, layering orchestral grandeur over cold, dissonant riffing in the tradition of the genre's most theatrical practitioners. They're among the newest acts in the domestic symphonic black metal scene, arriving with fully formed ambition.

Oakland's Hellbeard have been mining the Oakland sludge tradition since 2010, piling down-tuned misery onto doom's already crushing foundation. Their sound carries the Bay Area's industrial grit embedded in every slow, punishing riff.

Hellish Form push doom to its most suffocating extreme, folding sludge's abrasive texture into funeral doom's glacial pace and near-unbearable weight. Formed in 2020, they embrace desolation as an art form — slow, suffocating, and strangely beautiful.

Los Angeles' Hexen bring melodic sophistication and progressive ambition to the thrash template, threading complex arrangements through otherwise hard-hitting material. Their approach reflects the technical tradition of the LA metal scene while reaching toward something more compositionally adventurous.