Originally Posted by The Batlord

Yeah, but that's mostly been in the area of left-field, experimental metal bands. To me, the main point of metal is that it's louder than other forms of rock. So the main impetus for metal was making it heavier, faster, and/or more aggressive than the bands before. We kind of reached the high point in the nineties. You're not really gonna get much more brutal than death metal, or faster than grindcore, or heavier than Electric Wizard (well, maybe, but not to any profound degree), so outside of wild experimentation the main goal of metal has kind of been reached. Sure that's an over-simplification, but it's still somewhat true. There are plenty of good death/black/doom/thrash/whatever metal bands out there, but they're all pretty much retreading the same territory, so I'd say that metal is definitely stale from a creative standpoint.