I can agree with that, more or less. Metal's been around for nigh on 30 years now, and there hasn't really been a new style emerging in almost a decade. In the early 90s there was the rise of modern death, black and arguably modern doom metal plus all the subgenres within them. Since then? Just the rise of Isis/Neurosis-worshipping post-metal, which itself bears more than a passing resemblance to the stoner/sludge and drone acts around before them.
So we end up with a genre where a few individual bands are pushing the envelope but there's no real "new wave" of bands driving things. Which does kind of lead me to a question I can't answer: Have bands just gotten lazy, or is metal at a point where the only substantial innovations left have to come from absorbing other genres?
I mean, I can see metal digging a lot of new territory by heading into the areas currently occupied by noise art and psychedelic bands the same way black and doom metal integrated ambient music. On the other, I still see a few bands adding new things without going outside what would normally be considered metal.
