Los Angeles brutal death metal band formed in 1994, active in the California death metal underground through the mid-1990s before splitting up.

A California-based black metal project formed in 2019, contributing the track In His Offertory to the 2021 compilation The Black Archive Volume I.

A California black metal band active in 2001 whose short discography includes two early demos before disbanding.

Oakland's Barbarous is a death metal outfit that channels medieval battle, war, and gore into a sound rooted in the classic brutalist tradition of the genre.

Santa Cruz sludge metal outfit Barf leans into the genre's grimy, low-tuned heaviness, adding a dose of West Coast irreverence through a name that doubles as a statement of intent.

A Los Angeles-based power/thrash metal recording project helmed by Chris Rydo, Barking Spider features rotating guest musicians across its releases and has maintained an active presence in the underground since the early 2000s.

Santa Rosa, California's Barren Altar combine black and doom metal with lyrical themes of anti-theological liturgy and apocalyptic death worship, operating since 2013 as a fixture of Northern California's underground extreme metal scene.

Being As An Ocean formed in Alpine, California in 2011 and became known for a post-hardcore sound that uses heaviness as a frame for confession, patience, and spiritual searching. Dear G-d... introduced the band's blend of melodic hardcore, spoken-word passages, swelling post-rock guitars, and screamed emotional release, with Joel Quartuccio's vocals often sounding closer to testimony than conventional frontman performance. How We Both Wondrously Perish and the self-titled album broadened the formula, adding cleaner melodic hooks and more carefully shaped dynamics, while Waiting for Morning to Come, PROXY: An A.N.I.M.O. Story, and Death Can Wait pushed the band into more atmospheric and electronic spaces. Even as lineups shifted, the core remained recognizable: long builds, ringing guitars, abrupt eruptions, and lyrics that circle grief, faith, distance, and endurance. Being As An Ocean are heavy because of their crescendos and screams, but their real signature is emotional pacing. The songs often feel like letters becoming storms, with post-hardcore structure stretched toward catharsis rather than simple aggression one careful wave at a time.

Benümb were a grindcore and powerviolence band from the San Francisco Bay Area, formed in 1994 in Millbrae, California. Their debut full-length Soul of the Martyr (1998) was a chaotic and highly regarded document of the West Coast powerviolence scene, and the band maintained their intensity through Withering Strands of Hope (2000) and By Means of Upheaval (2003) on Relapse Records before disbanding in 2006. Several members went on to form Agenda of Swine.