I agree that BM's very best days have probably passed, however there is a great deal of quality black metal music being made and I doubt whether the genre will ever become insignificant.
My favourite black metal records are from the early 1990s, when I was in my late teens, but there is still plenty of high quality black metal, particularly from the underground.:shycouch:

How was I being "kvlt" at all? I was advocating the supremacy of the foundational bands that are widely known and respected, not obscure 21st century acts who limit their releases to this number of copies on this outdated format....

Anyways, allow me to rephrase: contemporary black metal is approaching irrelevance.

some contemporary black metal is irrelevant.
but not all.

The new Liturgy album is mostly brilliant. Not specifically because it's Black Metal, though. But anyhow, how many sub-genres stay relevant over 20 years?

That's a good point.Not many I would think as time moves on.

The thing is, though, that Black Metal-hybrid sort of stuff has been really great these last few years. Stuff like Deathspell Omega, Gnaw Their Tongues, Liturgy, Alcest, even Mt Eerie on Wind's Poem, are in no way 'tr00' BM, but they show how powerfull the genre is, and how the ideas can be used differently. I don't know enough about the original stuff, but I love a lot of this newer stuff. As an influence, BM is definitely relevant today. Probably more than it has been for a long time.

Gnaw Their Tongues is downright spooky! I got a free cd with a magazine subscription, that s*** is just spooky.:wave::soccer:

I know! The last one was so great! But it's as much classical samples as it is anything related to BM.

Gnaw Their Tongues deserves more love!

Agreed.