Fresh out of Asheville, North Carolina in 2025, Killiad brew sludge, stoner, and doom into something slow-boiled and heavy as wet earth. Asheville's fertile heavy underground provides the perfect conditions for this kind of deliberate, bone-deep metal.

Sarver, Pennsylvania's King of Undeath deal in doom metal with a name that telegraphs the aesthetic — slow, death-soaked, and funereal in the most satisfying way. A 2022 project that leans hard into the genre's darkest corners.

Drawing equally from doom and traditional heavy metal, Los Angeles' King Raven have been crafting dark, riff-driven songs since 2014. Their sound carries a gothic weight without fully surrendering to doom's slowest tempos.

King Woman is the San Francisco project of vocalist and songwriter Kristina Esfandiari, originally conceived as a solo endeavor around 2009 and later expanded into a full band. Their 2017 Relapse Records debut Created in the Image of Suffering, preceded by the 2015 EP Doubt on The Flenser, merged crushing doom metal with the hazy textures of shoegaze, drawing critical comparisons to Swans and Chelsea Wolfe. The follow-up, Celestial Blues (2021, Relapse), deepened the band's exploration of trauma, religious disillusionment, and atmospheric weight.

The solo project of Kirk Windstein — guitarist and vocalist known for his work in Crowbar and Down — this New Orleans doom vehicle launched in 2020 as a deeply personal, dirge-laden outlet. Windstein's signature tone and Southern Gothic heaviness are unmistakable here, steeped in the grief and grit that define NOLA metal.

Tacoma's Knuckle Dragger has been dragging sludge and doom through the South Sound since 2016. Fitting for a city with a gritty, blue-collar identity, their music is punishingly slow, low-tuned, and unapologetically heavy in the tradition of the Pacific Northwest's sludge lineage.

Scorching Black Metal (early); Melodic Post-Black Metal / Shoegaze (mid); Black / Death / Doom Metal (later) from Keller.

Named after the Swedish word for graveyard, San Diego's Kyrkogård have been crafting black/doom metal since 2018 — slow, smothering, and steeped in the kind of bleak Nordic atmosphere rarely conjured from Southern California.