San Diego's Wormskull have been crawling through a gutter of black metal and punk since 2011, building a sound that deliberately strips the genre down to something raw and street-level. Rather than pursuing the atmospheric or symphonic ends of black metal, they lean toward the primitivism that connects the genre's roots to hardcore punk's confrontational energy.

Wovenwar formed in Southern California in 2013 as a direct consequence of the arrest of As I Lay Dying vocalist Tim Lambesis for soliciting the murder of his wife, with four of that band's remaining members — guitarists Nick Hipa and Phil Sgrosso, bassist Josh Gilbert, and drummer Jordan Mancino — joining Oh, Sleeper vocalist Shane Blay. The group's self-titled debut (2014, Metal Blade) and follow-up Honor Is Dead (2016) pursued melodic heavy metal and alternative metalcore territory, finding a substantial audience before the original members returned to As I Lay Dying in 2018.

San Francisco's Wrack have been hauling sludge and doom through the Bay Area underground since 2016, blending the city's storied tradition of heavy music with slow, corrosive riffs built for endurance rather than speed. Their sound evokes the weight of the fog-laden coastline — dense, unhurried, and unrelenting.

Orange County, California thrash outfit formed in 2017, wielding the kind of aggressive, riff-forward attack that draws from the Bay Area playbook while staying rooted in the SoCal underground. Their name telegraphs a dual-edged intensity that carries through their punishing rhythmic assault.

Wrath of Logarius formed in San Francisco, California, having evolved from the project Martyr Logarius, and signed with Season of Mist ahead of their 2023 EP Necrotic Assimilation. The band describes their approach as "formless black metal," navigating between raw black metal, brutal death metal, and post-metal textures without settling into a fixed genre identity. Named after the boss character from the video game Bloodborne, the project earned early attention for its layered and eerie compositional sensibility within the Season of Mist underground division.

Los Angeles heavy metal band formed in 2025, straddling the line between hard rock energy and traditional heavy metal weight in a city with a deep legacy of both. A brand-new act arriving on the LA scene with the hard-rocking, riff-driven sensibility of the genre's classic era.

Los Angeles avant-garde black metal duo formed in 2017, notable for replacing conventional guitar with grand piano as the primary instrument alongside drums and shrieked vocals. The result is a genuinely strange, dissonant take on black metal that sounds like nothing else in the California underground.

San Diego death metal and grindcore band formed in 2023, operating out of Southern California's second-largest city with a sound that fuses grindcore's hyper-compressed violence with the riff architecture of old-school death metal. A young act already tapping into the city's historically fertile underground extreme scene.

An Oakland, California death metal band formed in 2022, whose name sets the tone perfectly — this is fetid, deliberately unclean death metal in the tradition of the Bay Area's more grotesque underground. The filth is the point, and they lean into it with enthusiasm.