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.

San Francisco's The Burial Tide have been submerging listeners in atmospheric sludge metal since 2011, building music that moves with the patient, crushing momentum of a tide that doesn't rush because it doesn't need to. Their sound captures something specific to the Bay Area underground — heavy, deliberate, and shot through with an ambience that feels earned rather than applied.

Los Angeles' The Cimmerian draw on the ancient and barbaric spirit their name invokes — stoner/sludge metal built for the long haul, riff-heavy and swaggering with the kind of fuzz-soaked weight that the genre's best practitioners have always known how to deploy. Formed in 2022, they enter a Los Angeles heavy scene with deep roots and find their place in the lineage naturally.

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.

Out of the small coastal enclave of Baywood-Los Osos, California, Toxic Wizard collapse genre walls with reckless abandon, fusing sludge heaviness, grindcore violence, power metal theatrics, and experimental noise into a deliberately unclassifiable whole since 2016.

Moreno Valley, California's Trapped Within Burning Machinery have been churning out slow, suffocating doom and sludge metal since 2009, combining crushing low-end weight with the caustic edge their name implies.

Santa Cruz, California doom and sludge trio that has been cultivating slow, toxic heaviness since 2017, combining the crushing weight of doom with stoner haze and sludge's abrasive edge. Their Bandcamp handle hints at a UK-influenced atmosphere despite their West Coast roots.

Tung is a sludge metal band from Ventura, California, formed in 2019, delivering slow-grinding heaviness rooted in the coastally-tinged Southern California underground scene.