The death of speed metal left a large hole in alienated popular culture. The bands once praised by Robert Fripp and Tony Iommi alike for maintaining their integrity were beginning, bit by bit, to get dragged into making music to please the buying public. As a result, the next generation of metal musicians took the black/thrash from the early 1980s and mixed it into the rhythmically abrupt style of melodic narrative composition that marked speed metal in its full maturity. It stepped aside from muted strumming in favor of fasting, wrist-whipping tremolo, and of course used the hoarse overdriven vocals that were also common in grindcore. However, pentatonic scales and conventional harmony went out the window in favor of detuned power chords and chromatic progressions, making this one of the most foreboding and antisocial art forms yet rendered by humanity. Like other postmodern musics, including "free jazz" and serial music, death metal threw aside conventional harmony for a rough grouping of riffs by similar motifs in rhythm and tone, and quickly grew from being relatively random into a style that, like classical music, created a poetry of action in the change between themes. Unlike the more abstract music, however, death metal was more like opera, in that riffs resembled the scenes they described, with rhythms emulating violent acts, march tempos, the tugging of a surgeon's knife, or the arraying of armies to face one another. This sudden liberation allowed death metal to both escape the "sold out" dimensions of pop music, and gave it impetus toward more detailed compositions, leading to a proliferation of progressive and semi-progressive styles that, unlike jazz or popular music, constructed a melodic core to each song and hung related clusters of motifs off of it. At this point death metal was more like ambient or folk/country music, and not surprisingly, it was to these genres most death metal musicians went after their bands had run their course. Death metal remains enduringly popular for its rhythmic attack and complexity in riffing, which appeals to those who are bored with the relatively structureless and thus limited harmonic approach of blues and jazz jams. It has been embraced worldwide by many different ethnicities, and because of this, is often associated with a pride in one's country or tribe. Thanks in part to its indecipherable vocals, however, it remains universal as a sound forever associated with the darker thoughts most people quarantine in the subconscious mind.

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