Los Angeles' Harassor weld black metal misanthropy to hardcore punk fury, a confrontational and abrasive act since 2010 whose music sounds like it was recorded in a burning building on purpose.

San Francisco's Hard Driver have been trafficking in traditional heavy metal since 2017, a city that once defined the genre's most extreme edges now home to a band with its eye firmly on the classic sound.

Brentwood, California's Hard Fail push melodic death metal with enough melodic sensibility to hook you and enough pure death metal weight to follow through since forming in 2018.

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please update this band

Los Angeles's Harum Scarum have been a fixture of the city's progressive thrash underground since 2014, fusing speed metal's kinetic energy with progressive structures that don't sacrifice aggression for sophistication. They move fast and think hard simultaneously.

San Diego's HarXson are a brand-new thrash metal outfit formed in 2025, carrying the torch for a genre the city has embraced since the 1980s. Still early in their existence, they bring the speed, aggression, and riff-forward approach that thrash has always demanded.

California's Hat occupy a grimy corner where death metal's brutality meets sludge metal's oppressive drag, and they've been doing so since 2011. There's a caustic, tar-thick quality to their output — ugly in all the right ways.

San Francisco's Hatchet have been one of the Bay Area's more committed torchbearers for classic thrash since 2012, keeping the genre's technical precision and speed-driven riff vocabulary alive. They worship at the altar of the genre's golden era without sounding like a museum piece.