Hi mods,

I wonder, whether the genre tag "dissonant" was ever considered to be accepted as a prefix to the already existing genres.
As far as I see, usually the bands with decisive dissonant sound are labelled as "technical/avant-garde XY" metal. However, I feel this tag is a little bit misleading, since it does not necessarily mean the expected technical skills and complicated songwriting. It's kind of hard to explain objectively but I think most of the people could easily distinguish the "traditional" technical (e.g. the usual The Artisan Era releases) sound from the more abstract, dissonant ones (Portal, Nightmarer, Mithridatum, Ulcerate, Ad Nauseam, etc.)
The avant-garde tag might be good, but still, emphasized avant-garde elements does not necessarily mean that the overall sound will be dissonant.
The experimental tag might be the best hint toward the dissonant sound, but most of the bands I've cited above do not have this tag in their genre description.

I'd love to hear your opinion on this matter.

I have never seen or been involved in any discussion about "dissonant" as a genre tag. Isn't it more of a description than a genre? I feel like it would make more sense to keep such descriptions in the reviews.

I can see this term being used, as a prefix to the base genre definition, like there is brutal death metal, technical death metal and dissonant death metal for example. The whole starting point for me was when I tried to search this genre tag in the site and realized that none of the bands are listed with this tag.

Brutal death and technical death are widely recognized official genres, whereas dissonant death isn't, which is why we don't use it. The tags "avant-garde" or "experimental" are generally sufficient, and I checked all the bands listed and 4/5 are listed with one of the tags. The level of dissonance just seems like a specific description rather than musical genre, and we have reviews for that...

I'm not sure this is a correct assessment of the situation. Bands can have such tags without skills or complicated songwriting, can't they? Technical/avantgarde/experimental doesn't imply skilful musicianship or complicated songwriting. Even unskilled musicians can play technical death metal or whatever. And you can be more experimental with your sound than other bands without the songwriting being more complicated.