San Francisco's Shotgun Facelift take the experimental and technical end of deathcore into genuinely unpredictable territory, founded in 2020 and building a sound that treats the genre's heaviness as raw material for something far more dissonant and architecturally unusual.

California brutal/technical death metal band formed in 2022, taking their name from the Egyptian crocodile deity and channeling that ferocity into precisely executed, crushing extremity.

Sombra are an Anaheim, California progressive/technical death metal band formed in 2019, pursuing a complex and intricate approach to extreme metal that emphasizes compositional sophistication alongside raw brutality.

San Francisco's The Undying fuse symphonic orchestration with technical death metal brutality and deathcore breakdowns, a combination that has driven their sound since forming in 2011. Their music is uncompromising in its ambition, stacking complexity and cinematic scale into the same passages.

Los Angeles technical death metal outfit The Zenith Passage traffic in hyper-precise, clinically complex arrangements that pit brutal aggression against intricate instrumental interplay, active since 2018. They represent LA's growing technical death metal contingent, drawing comparisons to the genre's most demanding practitioners.

Avant-garde technical death metal band from Rancho Cucamonga, California, formed in 2019, pushing the boundaries of the genre with unconventional song structures and psychedelic sonic experimentation layered over complex death metal riffing.

San Jose, California's Wrvth have one of the more interesting trajectories in extreme metal, beginning as a technical death metal and deathcore act before gradually shifting toward progressive post-metal and metalcore over the course of their career since 2010. The evolution is genuine rather than expedient, with each era of the band producing work that's stylistically distinct but consistently ambitious.