Long Beach, California's Red River Massacre trade in sludge-soaked stoner metal that bakes in Southern California's sun-bleached intensity and the corrosive weight of the city's underground. Since 2018, they've pursued a slow, oppressive heaviness that owes as much to Southern sludge tradition as it does to desert-rock psychedelia.

Los Angeles outfit Rowsdower, active since 2011, occupies the slow and swampy intersection of sludge, stoner, and doom metal — thick riffs, deliberate tempos, and the kind of hazy, heavy atmosphere that the LA underground has cultivated for decades. Their sound favors groove and weight over speed.