Composed by Jordyn Stubblefield, the beat feels light and atmospheric, and singers Emmanuel Kerry and Jaquay Smith call for creative freedom. The song speaks to pain, but implores listeners to not become consumed by it.

“It’s about finding joy in wherever you are,” says Bowie resident Haydn Smith (Jaquay’s brother), a producer and singer with Pilate — who, along with Stubblefield, tends to wear a mask in band photos. “It’s about being in that struggle, and trying to find a way out of it.”

“1000 Leagues” (listen below) is the first single from Pilate’s forthcoming EP, Like Gold, expected out Thanksgiving Day. The instrumental was created at least six years ago and was the last song completed for the project.

Smith, 28, says the group calls its message-driven blend of soul “trap gospel.” (It’s already a controversial descriptor in the gospel world.)

Citing OutKast, Goodie Mob and Nas as inspiration, the crew puts socially conscious lyrics on top of electronic trap beats: EP cut “Area 51” details America at war. “Runway,” Smith says, is an upbeat dance number about a womanizer who finds joy in the pursuit. But above all, Smith hopes that the EP can bring peace to its listeners.

“You have to learn to be happy with nothing,” Smith says. “Everything is a process, and everything is a learning experience.”

Warning: Explicit lyrics.

It’s easy to call Kane Mayfield a “rappity-rap” lyricist if you’re not paying attention.

A big guy with New York City bravado, the Long Island native embodies the “golden era” of hip-hop, when complex lyrics mattered more than booming beats. Kane’s got rhymes for days, but on his new album, The Return of Rap, the Baltimore resident backs off the music and lets it breathe. Mayfield’s discussing heavy themes — child labor, racial disparities and socioeconomic struggles — yet he calmly unpacks the narrative.

On “Cars Jewels Clothes” in particular, Kane takes a tongue-in-cheek look at worn rap themes, using a slurred cadence to chide “trap rap.”

“See n****s like when you rap like thiiis, on a track like piiimp,” Kane rhymes. The hook is a straightforward diss to the subgenre: “Cars? Check. Misogyny? Check. Gold like a n****a hit the lottery? Check. That’s all ya need, so my song’s complete. This is rap, right, so what you expect?”

The song sounds like a radio single, but it’s really a parody, Kane says. “It’s a poke in the eye of the mainstream-sounding stuff,” he tells Bandwidth. “It’s like, ‘You’re on hold with unemployment, but hey, I’m balling!’ That’s all we wanna hear about, but there’s more to life than that.”

“Cars Jewels Clothes” is one of the lighter tracks on his thematic new album. “It gives the listeners a break,” Kane says. “The message is still there, you just gotta dig a little harder to hear it.”

Still, Kane says he was afraid to release the LP due to its heavy messages. Much like Kendrick Lamar does on To Pimp A Butterfly, Kane examines his own shortcomings on The Return of Rap to offer a complete self-portrait.

“I don’t wear jewelry,” Kane says, half joking. “I’m devoid of stunting. I think we shouldn’t eat meat, but I really like steak. I really like the taste of chicken. I’m a hypocrite.”

The 1978ers, “People Of Today”

The duo believes in a higher power, of course: yU (Michael Willingham, Jr.) raps occasionally about his faith and how it pushes him through. Meanwhile, SlimKat (Zachariah McGant) is finishing a gospel-themed beat tape, among other projects. But that “God is good” line is sarcastic: the lyrics on “Sacreligious” denounce a preacher who uses his influence in salacious ways. He’s a slick talker, more interested in lining his pockets and sleeping with church women than spreading the good word.

“Got a limp like a pimp, a lotta rings up on his hands,” yU rhymes over SlimKat’s organ-driven beat.

“Sacreligious” deals with corruption in a religious context, but its ideas stretch further than that. “It’s about when people abuse their power,” yU says. “They’re supposed to lead, but eventually mother nature takes over.”

People Of Today marks the long-brewing full-length debut of The 1978ers. yU (who’s also in hip-hop trio Diamond District) and SlimKat have been making music together since 2001. They recorded “Sacreligious” in 2012, and some cuts from the album are even older: centerpiece “P.O.T. Act III” wrapped in 2008. The two met in the late ’90s at a State of the Union show in Northwest D.C. At the time, yU worked with a crew called The Remainz; SlimKat was a member of Khemystery with MC/producer Blackberry Jones.

“We grew as friends and started exchanging ideas,” SlimKat says. “We always made songs. We always knew we’d collaborate on something.” yU’s previous solo albums — 2010’s Before Taxes and 2011’s the EARN — had a ’78ers stamp on them. The two often run ideas and unfinished tracks past each other before they release them into the world.

Alongside his work with The 1978ers and Diamond District, yU is finishing an instrumental album, Culture > Couture and a solo LP called In the Listener’s Stance. SlimKat is finishing another instrumental beat tape called D.R.U.M. on top of his gospel beat tape.

None of those projects have firm release dates, but there’s no rush: The 1978ers understand that good songs age well. “If you can release a song with that much time on it and it still gives you that good feeling,” yU says, “maybe it was meant to stay.”

On Cycles, Dunc’s first instrumental album since 2010’s The Leftovers, he keeps the mood downtempo. This isn’t one to blast from your car; it’s the kind of thing you’d put on while cleaning the house or thinking about life. Dunc recorded much of the album last fall during a week of rainstorms. A Pisces, Dunc says he loves rainy days and autumn—two factors that contributed to Cycles‘ oceanic vibe.

Cycles standout “Through the Storm” dates back four years, to when Dunc heard multi-instrumentalist Charles Walsh plucking what would become the song’s bass line. The two worked together at the Atomic Music shop in Beltsville, Maryland. “I had the idea to build up the track like a storm—it’s calm, then it builds up and slows down,” Dunc says. Walsh, who also plays trumpet on the track, appears throughout Cycles with Dunc and keyboardist Drew Kid.

While Dunc still loves to sample, building music from scratch gives him a chance to be challenged. “I like to be versatile,” he says. “When you can put a creative stamp on something by writing music, that’s when you take the next step in becoming a great composer.”

Ras Nebyu doesn’t have time for misogynistic rap music. He admits that he’s no saint—the rapper sometimes uses the B word—but he says the entrenched sexism in hip-hop has taken a grim toll. “It’s getting out of hand to me,” says the 22-year-old Petworth native. “If we keep going like this, we’re not gonna be here anymore, man. Women sustain life.”

That’s part of the idea behind “Queens,” a highlight from Nebyu’s new mixtape, Ras Griffin III. Featuring vocalist Kailasa, the track co-produced by Black Jesus and The Arckitech takes a stand against sexism and promotes black togetherness—a particularly powerful theme now, in light of the recent tragedy and ongoing uprising in Ferguson, Missouri.

“Queens” also pays homage to one of Nebyu’s favorite artists, Queens-bred rapper Nas, whose landmark album, Illmatic, included a song called “Life’s a Bitch.” “You keep hearing the phrase ‘life’s a bitch,’ ‘life’s a bitch,” Nebyu says. “You’re always gonna get back what you put into it. Maybe if you didn’t address life as a bitch, you’d get more out of it.”

Nebyu sees Ras Griffin III as a document of D.C. hip-hop in 2014, even if it takes listeners a while to catch up to its philosophical rhymes and electronic trap beats. “It might not have its full effect at the moment,” Nebyu says. “But 10, 20, 30 years from now, people will look back and be like, ‘Wow, this is what was happening in D.C. at the time.”

Ras Nebyu performs Aug. 23 at Trillectro.

Yet in 2012, Bonney says, he hit a wall and needed a change. He moved to Los Angeles for the beaches, warm weather and presence of a robust music industry. “I’ve always felt at home whenever I’ve had a show in Cali,” Bonney says. “I stepped back and lived life a little more, and reassessed the direction I was headed. I was looking for a new sound. I needed to make a bigger leap. I wasn’t pressing the envelope.”

Now we’re hearing the latest example of that new sound: “Poom Poom,” which Bonney posted on Soundcloud last week, is an upbeat electro-pop track that the artist is pushing as an official single. Lyrically, the song describes a man pulled in by a woman’s gravitational force: “Got me opening the door with a top hat, I don’t even know how we got here,” goes one line. Musically, the track (produced by D.C.’s own Best Kept Secret) sounds made for the club—much more so than his previous work. That was done on purpose.

“I’m on some stuff that’ll get people dancing,” Bonney says. “When the song comes on, it makes you wanna have fun. I almost feel like I’m a new artist again.”

As a kid growing up in Northeast D.C., Antoine Williams played AAU basketball. “I thought I was the man,” says Williams. “I had crazy handles. But in basketball, you find out there’s someone like you on every block.”

As his basketball aspirations faded, Williams began to focus more on developing his rap career, since he had already grown a decent following under the name Fatz da Big Fella. “I saw that people listened to a lot of the things I said,” he says, “so I thought, ‘Why not put it on a track?’ I knew I had a gift.”

These and other autobiographical details find their way into “Grew Up,” the opener from Fatz da Big Fella’s new Fatz Sinatra mixtape. But the track—which also features D.C. singer Frank Sirius—doesn’t just reminisce on Fatz’s youthful hoop dreams. He takes it as an opportunity to get real about his upbringing. His first verse starts: “My childhood was [messed] up, 20 people, one house/Four sleeping in one room, two folks on the couch.”

Fatz says he wanted the song—and the tape—to tell an extremely personal story with grit and honesty. According to the MC, it’s a first. “I never really exposed my life,” he says. “It was time to grow up and talk about the struggle. People see the glitz, glamor and the way I do things, but I came from nothing.”

Fatz didn’t always think rap was his calling card. But after he saw Wale, Tabi Bonney and Raheem DeVaughn make national waves, it began to sink in that D.C. artists could make their mark outside of the region. Wale, who appeared on Fatz’ 2012 Heart of a King mixtape, reemerges on the Sinatra track “Talk About It” with New York rapper French Montana. The new tape also features rising D.C. rapper Shy Glizzy (on “Miami Vice”), local crooner and rapper Visto (“On Who”) and perpetual superstar-in-waiting Phil Adé (“Celebration”), also from the D.C. area.

“I wanted those soulful, heartfelt songs,” Fatz says about Sinatra. “It’s easy to talk about the club life and the things you see on TV, because people don’t wanna tap into when they were at their worst. [But] let me talk to the person that’s going through something. There’s more people struggling than people winning.”

Producer: SlimKat78
Stats: Age 36, Deanwood
Notable Collaborators: yU, Bilal Salaam, Eric Roberson

If you’ve attended a show at Bohemian Caverns/Liv lately, you’ve probably seen SlimKat78: The producer works the soundboard for the historic U Street venue. But the Deanwood resident is a formidable composer in his own right, having produced music for singers Maimouna Youssef, Bilal Salaam and Muhsinah, among many others.

Like many artists, SlimKat started young: As a student at Duke Ellington School of the Arts, he played music over the loudspeakers in between class periods, and later bought a sampler and began to create his own music. Still, the budding artist didn’t release anything until the mid-2000s. In 2010, SlimKat released a beat tape, Soundfreakers Vol. 1, which collected heavy drums and old vocal samples. Elsewhere, he’s produced singles for singer Nicholas Ryan Gant and California rapper Trek Life.

These days, SlimKat is working on several of his own instrumental projects: one with live instrumentation, a gospel-themed beat tape and another called D.R.U.M., which Slim says will be an expansive mix of percussive sounds. But his most anticipated project arrives later this year, when he and D.C.-area rapper yU—known collectively as the 1978ers—release a promising collaborative album. The forthcoming People of Today deals with the broad theme of people’s lives, from D.C.-based MC Grap Luva to philandering preachers. The project was conceived almost five years ago, SlimKat says.

“Mike [yU] and I are lifetime friends, and a lot of the album stems from agreements and disagreements we’ve had,” says the producer. “It’s like a discussion we’ve had amongst ourselves.”

Producer: Kev Brown
Stats: Age 38, Landover, Md.
Notable Collaborators: DJ Jazzy Jeff, Gods’illa, Phonte

Kev Brown once preferred rapping over making beats. But after a few performances in the local open-mic scene, Brown decided he wanted to rhyme with original music. In 1998, the Landover native—who cites Pete Rock as a major influence—heard a copy of Rock’s landmark project, Soul Survivor. “I thought, ‘Whoa, this is how you make beats,’” Brown says. His production style combines the music he grew up on—Dilla, A Tribe Called Quest, Wu-Tang Clan—with his own low-key vibe.

In 2005, Brown released a solo album, I Do What I Do, on which he rapped alongside members of the local Low Budget crew (Kenn Starr, Quartermaine and Oddisee) with rapper Phonte (now a singer with The Foreign Exchange) and vocalist Raheem DeVaughn.

Yet over the years, Brown hasn’t rapped as much. He’s released a slew of instrumental projects and spit a few bars on other work, but he doesn’t enjoy it as much as making beats. “I’m not that technical,” Brown says. “It’s like school to me to write. I might as well be in math class or something.” With that said, Brown is finishing a new project that includes more of his own rapping, but it won’t be like I Do What I Do. He says it’s more like “I’m doing whatever I want.”

Kev Brown image by Daniel Love

Producer: Drew Dave
Stats: Age 25, Alexandria, Va.
Notable collaborators: Pro’Verb, Doe Cigapom, Lyriciss

In 2011, Drew Dave—then known as Soulful!—released Mumbo Sauce and Drumbreaks, a robust collection of brassy soul that established the young producer as a promising local talent. Since then, the Alexandria artist has only gotten better. His beat for Pro’Verb’s “Too Hip-Hop”—a hypnotic web of strings, boom-bap and piano—could have resonated without lyrics; and his instrumental for Lyriciss’ “Get It & Go” provided the hard edge needed for the rapper’s dissection of capitalist America.

More recently, Drew Dave and D.C. rapper Doe Cigapom co-starred on Life As We Know It; there, Drew opted for traditional soul, an old-school approach that dates back to 2005. “When I heard Common’s Be, it was everything for me,” says Dave, now 25. “I like the crackle of the vinyl. My style is vintage soul with a modern flair.”

Dave says he’s working on a recording with rapper Cortez as well as his forthcoming instrumental album, SynthBASED, which uses a lot of beats with synthesized bass lines. He’s hoping to release that EP-turned-full-length by the end of summer.

Producer: Dunc
Stats: Age 25, Cheverly, Md.
Notable collaborators: Toine (in DTMD)

Makin’ Dollas, the 2011 debut of local hip-hop duo DTMD, felt steeped in the classics. That’s because producer Dunc—one half of the duo alongside MC Toine—built the recording’s tracks on the ’60s soul he was listening to at the time. “I was listening to a lot of underground classic soul,” says Dunc, who lives in Cheverly, Maryland. “I come from nontraditional hip-hop roots. Through hip-hop, I’ve discovered different genres.”

Dunc started making beats at 16, and found a valuable education after he met then-local producer and rapper Oddisee via MySpace. “He taught me how to make beats on Fruity Loops,” Dunc says. “It was almost like an internship.”

These days, Dunc says he listens to contemporary stuff like Little Dragon, Toro y Moi, Flying Lotus and Samiyam, which helps explain why his work now sounds more electronic and less sample-based than his past productions. DTMD’s new album, Reset, is in progress and could drop in September; meanwhile, Dunc is also working with a new rapper, BOOM, on his forthcoming EP, and he plans to release his own 10-song instrumental, Cycles, which will combine his newfound electronic influences with live instrumentation.

This song contains explicit lyrics.

Photo by Flickr user aleXwire used under a Creative Commons license.

Now Asheru has a new music video for a song that touts his local pride. Over an Afrobeat instrumental, “Funky D.C.”—a track from his recent South Africa-influenced album Sleepless In Soweto—finds the veteran rapper shouting out neighborhoods and locations in his hometown: “Trinidad, Uptown, Mount Pleasant, Adams Morgan, Southwest Waterfront, Benning Road, Minnesota, Sheriff Road…”

Shot at the D.C. Funk Parade in May, the video has Asheru performing with the Ballou Senior High School Marching Band along U Street NW. Asheru says he wanted the video to focus on the students and the work they put in. “I wanted to make sure we got all the best sides of the city in one visual,” says the rapper, who’s served as Ballou’s director of arts integration for the past three years. But he aimed to demonstrate his own multitudes, too. “I also wanted this to show the many sides of Asheru.”

In May, Ash released a video for “So Amazing” that was shot during a visit to South Africa this spring. After “Funky D.C.,” he plans to drop a new video every month until a remix project for Sleepless in Soweto releases this fall.