Los Angeles outfit Taarkus emerged in 2016 at the crossroads of doom and progressive metal, threading heavy, slow-burning riffs through elaborate arrangements that reward patient listeners. Named after the ELP album, they carry that spirit of ambition into the doom underground — crushing low-end weight balanced against exploratory song structures that push well beyond standard genre constraints.

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.

Oakland's Thane have been cultivating their death/doom sound since 2015, drawing on the Bay Area's tradition of heavy, serious metal and steering it into the slower, more oppressive corridors of the genre hybrid. Their music shares the grinding patience of classic death-doom — long songs, cavernous production, and a heaviness that accumulates with deliberate intent.

Los Angeles' The Crooked Whispers navigate the overlap between doom and sludge metal with a sound that channels the city's long history of heavy, slow-burn underground music. Formed in 2020, they traffic in the kind of grim, feedback-soaked weight that bands like the Melvins and Saint Vitus made foundational — updated for an era with no patience for artifice.

Santa Cruz's The Sun Must Die channel death-doom's most oppressive impulses — slow, tar-thick riffs laid over cavernous death metal vocals — into a sound that feels as though the California coastline has been swallowed by darkness. Formed in 2015, the project leans into the nihilistic end of the doom-death spectrum.

Sacramento, California outfit formed in 2023 that takes a notably wide approach, weaving together death metal brutality, doom metal weight, and thrash momentum into a style that rewards listeners willing to follow them through the shifts in tempo and atmosphere.

San Diego's Tideless weave death-doom density with shoegaze texture, producing a sound that's simultaneously crushing and immersive — churning riffs suspended in reverberant haze. The band has been refining this submerged aesthetic since forming in 2016.

San Francisco's Tomes have been threading doom metal's crush through a thrash and hardcore framework since 2014, producing music that carries Bay Area aggression in its bones while slowing things down enough to feel genuinely oppressive.

San Francisco's Totem approach doom metal through a psychedelic lens, layering hazy, reverb-soaked atmospheres over glacially slow riff progressions in a style that reflects the Bay Area's history of mind-expanding heavy music.