Los Angeles stoner metal act Fallen Suns have been letting their riffs breathe since 2016, drawing on Southern California's long tradition of fuzz-soaked heavy rock and desert-influenced slowburn. Their music moves at the pace of heat — unhurried, thick, and designed to expand in open space.

Los Angeles stoner metal outfit Ganjashaman follow the smoke-filled, riff-heavy path that the genre demands, trading in fuzz-soaked grooves and hazy psychedelic weight since 2018. They fit naturally into Southern California's long tradition of heavy, sun-baked psychedelia.

Santa Cruz, California's Gargantula has been spinning its web since 2015, weaving together progressive, stoner, doom, and death metal into something strange and sprawling. Their compositions wander freely across tempos and moods, held together by a psychedelic, spidery sensibility.

San Diego's Garth Algar dishes out stoner-laced sludge metal with the easygoing swagger and slow-rolling heaviness that the Southern California coast seems to generate naturally. Active since 2012, the band's party-ready name belies how genuinely crushing the music gets.

Monterey Bay's Granted Earth have spent over a decade weaving progressive ambition into the fabric of sludge, stoner, and post-metal, arriving at something genuinely exploratory. Their music moves between crushing weight and expansive, atmospheric drift with rare intentionality.

Los Angeles's Groamville have been rolling out heavy stoner rock and metal since 2014, favoring down-tuned grooves, fuzzed-out riffs, and a relaxed, head-nodding pace that serves the music's hypnotic power. They're a reliable name in the city's well-populated desert rock underground.

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.

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.

Oakland's High on Fire are one of the defining forces in American doom and sludge, built on Matt Pike's mythological vision and the kind of riff density that makes everything around it feel thin. Since reforming their presence in the early 2010s, they have remained one of the heaviest and most uncompromising bands on earth.