Metal has steadily gotten heavier, faster, everything metal about it has increased in the past forty some-odd years since the first bands started. What do you think newer bands can do to keep it up? Or can they?

Does it just approach white noise at some point, or do people pay to line up and be hit by a freight train?

How do we increase the intensity of metal without air-lifting a 17-ton boulder overhead and dropping it on the fans?

That said, what's the craziest shit you've ever listened to?

Fleshgod Apocalypse - Agony is probably my favorite blunt-force-trauma-to-the-face type album.

I notice they have gotten slightly less insane since that one. Probably advice from the doctor, or they got a secret visit from Airforce One, like, "You will need to stop this!" I still like the newer stuff, but Agony makes me want to check into the Intensive Care Unit, just in case.

It's all been done by now. When someone talks about the heaviest shit ever, I usually think about stuff like Last Days Of Humanity, and that still barely classifies as music. Anything "heavier" than that and you enter the noise category.

I can' think of anything heavier than Anaal Nathrakh and Pyrrhon to be honest.

The current progression of this trend is the deathcore/djent stuff, where they realized it's futile to try to get heavier just by getting faster and noisier, so instead they try to get the guitar tone as thick as possible, and mix up the rhythms to make something more confusing. To some extent, I agree that approach IS heavier than something like Last Days of Humanity. Anaal Nathrakh and Pyrrhon seem to take a mixture of the two approaches, which indeed creates something very heavy. The thing is, even before there was rock music, there was music more extreme than any non-experimental death metal, but no one actually listened to it, it was all weird atonal noise stuff made by art musicians just for the art of it. All extreme metal has really done is bring extreme music to the mainstream. And mainstream music does continue to get more and more extreme, take dubstep for example. So no, metal can't get any metaller because in order to get wear extreme metal has already done to get more extreme, it had to move away from metal, taking more influence from hardcore punk and noise music. Straight death metal was the heaviest pure (which already came from the hardcore punk influenced thrash metal, but it moved away from thrash's punk roots) metal going down that approach, and deathcore/djent is the heaviest down the other approach. Beyond that metal would have to take influence from electronic music to get any heavier (industrial in the former case, and something like dubstep in the latter). And to some extent, the most extreme music has already been reached, but really extremeness is all in the ear of the beholder, so what's really going to be going on is just the overtime more extreme music will become accessible, and each level of extremeness will become more fleshed out. People will always just continue to experiment in new ways, and sometimes those experimentations will lead to a new genre.