That’s why the title of his new EP — The Internal Frontier, which is also his band’s name — makes a lot of sense.

“Eventually you hit a fork in the road when you’re either going to have to deal with it, or it’s going to keep lingering,” says Mimikos. “That’s kind of what happened.”

So the vocalist and guitarist used music to help process his emotions, and find himself along the way.

“I’m trying to satisfy my needs in that moment, so I play until I find something that I feel,” Mimikos says. “That’s the moment where the spark happens.”

Mimikos says he feels like his situation has drastically improved and he wants to be as honest as he can. He suspects that tapping into his personal experiences will make his songs sound more authentic. His optimism resonates on The Internal Frontier, feeding the record’s hopeful, hooky pop anthems. Compared to his first EP – the grittier, down-home Chaos to Clarity — it sounds like Mimikos hit the reset button on his emotional state.

He also reset his approach to playing music. After years of playing in different bands, Mimikos says he felt ready for a solo project he could control completely.

“I’m pretty ADD when it comes to music, so the second time around I was like, ‘You know, I think I want to try something a little more on the poppy spectrum of things — and maybe try a little electric guitar and maybe a little more synth,'” Mimikos says.

The song that he feels like encapsulates the energy of his new album? “Paradigm.”

“For me, that song was like a rebirth,” Mimikos says. “When I hear it, it still puts a smile on my face.”

“I like to treat a lot of my songs like tiny stories,” says Henry, 29.

That’s how the Arlington native approached her song “Hands” (listen below), a highlight from the EP, Matchsticks, out May 15.

“The story of this song is about a person who is trying to reach out to a friend who is having trouble trusting — and just trying to express that that’s an understandable feeling. Everybody goes through those moments where they don’t know if they can trust their own feelings,” Henry says.

The songwriter, who has written and performed songs since age 13, grew up jamming with her family members. Her parents had a band that played oldies covers, and she says these days, it’s not unheard of for her to break into a four-part harmony with her mother, godmother and godmother’s daughter.

“I’ve been hearing music in my house in rehearsals and stuff since I was basically born,” she says.

Henry’s mother makes a cameo as a backup singer on “In My Eyes,” another cut from Matchsticks, and mom and daughter will sing together when Henry plays Arlington venue IOTA May 15.

But Matchsticks isn’t strictly a family affair. The EP features Suvo Suri on electric violin and Lighting Fires member Andrew Gaddy on vocals and instrumentation. And while her parents’ love of folk and country has influenced her music, Henry takes her sound in a different direction, imbuing her songs with indie sensibilities and pop flourishes.

She’s excited to release the EP, then finally hit the road for a summer tour.

“It is hopefully just the beginning of a whole lot of big and beautiful music,” Henry says.

Henry plays a release show May 15 at IOTA Club & Café.

“I’ll write you songs in an open key,” the duo sings on their recent EP, I Guess We’re Doing Alright. “The notes will ring out into eternity.”

Daviss and Kelly, both 24, met while studying at Yale, where they sang in a capella groups. Neither majored in music — they mostly just played for fun — but they had formidable musical backgrounds: Daviss, a native Texan, played both violin and guitar, and Kelly, reared in South Carolina, had skills on saxophone, guitar and drums.

As their bond has deepened, so has their shared investment in music-making. “Music has become more and more a big part of our lives and our relationship,” Daviss says.

Handsome Hound’s EP isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, however. Track No. 5, “Hannah,” brings depth to their sound. Daviss says the song harks back to her childhood in the South, where social norms around gender were clearly drawn and reinforced.

The song channels the “feeling of wanting to push back on that, but not push back so much that you’re not yourself anymore,” Daviss says.

“Hey, hey, hey Hannah, don’t lose yourself tonight,” the song goes. “I know you wanna keep putting up a fight.”

Daviss and Kelly say they’re both feminists — and proud of it.

Handsome Hound jokes about their name and the dogs on the EP’s cover — “What I like to tell people on stage is that Claire is pretty handsome and I sort of look like a dog,” says Kelly — but their moniker has roots in history.

Cuchulain is an old Irish name, related to the mythological figure Hercules, Kelly says. But it literally means the “Hound of Culland,” Culland being a province on Old Northern Ireland. When Kelly’s peers mocked his name in the schoolyard, he complained to his dad.

“I’d be like, ‘Dad, why’d you guys give me this weird name?’” Kelly says, “and he was like, ‘Tell them it means Handsome Hound.’”

Handsome Hound plays April 30 at the Kingman Island Bluegrass and Folk Festival.

“I was thinking strategically and maybe a little bit cynically about calling a place home,” says Servick, 27. “I was sort of skeptical about D.C. being a place, ultimately, for me to stay.”

It was this experience that inspired the lyrics for “Under the Pines,” one of the first songs her indie-folk trio wrote together.

Servick met guitarist Avy Mallik when they both answered an ad to back a traditional Indian musician at the Kennedy Center. Less than a year later, they formed the band Near Northeast, with Servick on vocals and violin and Austin Blanton on bass.

The trio released its debut album Curios in 2015, and worked with D.C.-based photographer and animator Kip Radt and graphic artist Ashley Blanton — Austin’s sister — to animate a music video for “Under the Pines.”

“A lot of my art includes very solitary, lonely figures,” Ashley Blanton says. “When Kip animated it, all of these misfit characters came together and found this place where they all fit.”

The music video melds realistic symbols and photographs of Northeast D.C. with a fantasy world constructed from Blanton’s artwork. Radt used Blanton’s work to create paper doll parts that he later animated.

The first lines of the song, “I think I’m gonna find a slow train to ride” jumped out at Radt, and he asked his mother to send him his grandfather’s old toy train set for the project. But the group decided on another protagonist: a lonely cloud.

“The cloud is a symbol for us all, wanting to feel loved and belong to something bigger,” Radt says.

Mallik initially wrote the music for “Under the Pines,” drawing influence from the late Takoma Park fingerstyle guitarist John Fahey, as well as Merle Travis, Chet Atkins and bluesmen such as Lead Belly, Son House and Blind Boy Fuller.

But Near Northeast has more unconventional ideas for its next batch of songs.

“We’ve talked a lot about music and shared a lot about music,” says Austin Blanton, 26. “We’ve found some stranger things that we’re interested in that we’d like to explore now” — including Servick’s new electric violin.

Near Northeast plays Hot Tub House Feb. 26 and the Hamilton March 3.

“The first time I sang [a song about depression] was the first time I saw someone cry at a show,” says Kilstein, 33. “I thought, ‘Well f**k, this is sort of what I always wanted to do with comedy but I could never do it.'”

A couple of years ago, the D.C.-born performer — who co-hosts the popular progressive podcast Citizen Radio and has appeared on The Conan O’Brien Show and Countdown With Keith Olbermann — opted to take his ranty act in a more musical direction. The change was prompted by a difficult time in his life: the death of his friend and mentor Robin Williams.

“[Williams] helped get me sober,” Kilstein says of the late comedy legend, who took his own life in 2014.

A few years ago, Williams appeared at one of Kilstein’s gigs in San Francisco, and wound up chatting with him backstage. They became friends. Williams would later help Kilstein book gigs and even fund his podcast.

“Robin didn’t really influence me comedically, but more as a person,” Kilstein says. “I think it’s almost cooler when they can inspire you to be a better person.”

After Williams’ death, Kilstein considered quitting comedy. But he ultimately decided that Williams wouldn’t have wanted that. So the performer evolved instead. Now, he takes on the same heated subjects he always has — like rape culture, male privilege, religion, drones and gay marriage — but puts it to music with his band, Jamie Kilstein and The Agenda.

Kilstein plans to release a new album of these musical rants early next year.

Warning: Explicit language.

“It’s by far what I’m most proud of. I said everything I wanted to say, I defended causes I really care about,” Kilstein says of the album. His new material doesn’t shy away from big issues, including adoption for same-sex couples, feminism and Islamophobia.

“The good news is that I’m not really a man of metaphors, so you can pretty much tell what the album is going to be about by the track listing,” Kilstein says. “For example, the first song is called ‘F**k the NRA,’ so it’s pretty clear what that’s about.”

But when he appears tonight at Tropicalia in D.C., Kilstein won’t only stick to politics.

“I thought I used to be so edgy screaming, ‘F**k the church,'” he says. “But to me now it’s arguably more important to be onstage saying, ‘It’s OK to take care of yourself, or feel sad.'”

Jamie Kilstein performs tonight at Tropicalia. His forthcoming album is available for preorder.

When WERA 96.7 goes live on Dec. 6, the first song the station will play is Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” says Arlington Independent Media Director Paul LeValley, whose nonprofit is launching the low-power station.

“Halfway through we’ll crossfade to a recording we just made in our studio of a bunch of people singing it,” LeValley says.

That musical introduction suits the community-oriented ethos of WERA, which plans to serve the needs of local residents. Formally known as Arlington Community Access Corporation, Arlington Independent Media has been around since 1982, providing mostly video-making resources to the community. But a few years ago the group’s board of directors asked LeValley to research the possibility of adding a low-power FM radio station to the organization.

“We didn’t know how we would fit a radio station into what was already a pretty full plate,” LeValley says. “But the more we thought about the mission of community radio the more we realized that it fit very well with what we do.”

LeValley says Arlington Independent Media wants to get everybody producing — not just consuming — media. “Our idea is that media shouldn’t be reserved for a few professionals here and there,” he says, “but that everybody should participate.”

Powered at a maximum of 100 watts and staffed by volunteers, WERA will be noncommercial. AIM plans to derive some income from equipment-use fees, but if volunteers help others produce radio work, LeValley says, they can earn “credits” toward equipment use.

Members of the public can volunteer to produce shows and radio packages on WERA. A board of 15 people called the Programming Advisory and Review Council will review volunteer applications for live radio programs as well as produced packages.

“Let’s say you want to produce a live music program about the blues. You submit an application to the PARC and describe what you have in mind, maybe you even have a little clip that you’ve produced at home,” LeValley says. “They’ll review it and perhaps work with you to make a suggestion or two to improve it. Then once approved, you’ll work with our radio coordinator to determine the time it’s going to play on the radio.” (WERA will also stream online at wera.fm.)

LeValley says the PARC has received around 45 applications so far, and he hopes to receive hundreds more. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis, and approved programs will be reviewed annually.

WERA isn’t the only new low-power station coming to the D.C. area: WOWD in Takoma Park, Maryland, wrapped up a successful crowdfunding campaign this year. Both WOWD (which hasn’t begun broadcasting yet) and WERA arrive in the wake of the Local Community Radio Act of 2010, which allowed the Federal Communications Commission to grant licenses to new low-power FM stations.

The legislation led to a bumper crop of little stations across the country, offering local, noncommercial alternatives to mainstream radio. That’s the kind of community service WERA plans to provide, says Arlington Independent Media’s director.

“As a general approach,” LeValley says, “we want to be as inclusive as possible.”

WERA hosts a family-friendly launch party Dec. 6 from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. at Arlington Independent Media.

That could be partly why Sandcastle Man, the forthcoming EP from Carey’s atmospheric group Luray, sounds so exploratory. Its concept is inspired by someone drummer C.J. Wolfe encountered on a trip to South Africa: a man who made his living building sandcastles and posing for photos with them.

Carey wrote lyrics to accompany Wolfe’s music for the song. She says it’s a fable about finding one’s way back home while facing trials, and describes the work as a metaphor for her own journey from her native Wisconsin.

“I know I can always go back to real home,” Carey says, “but there’s the part of you that wants to see the world and be an adventurer while also trying to find where you fit in.”

A former D.C. resident who now lives in Richmond, Virginia, the singer and banjo player debuted in 2013 with a serene release called The Wilder. Her second full-length, out in 2016, promises to chart new emotional territory in the aftermath of her breakup with her husband.

“The first record was more about trying to find myself as a creative person,” Carey says, “and [the next] one is more about relationships.”

Since her first album, Carey has built a new set of important relationships — with the people now in her band. She says she met Wolfe halfway through his music studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, and became acquainted with bassist Brian Cruse and guitarist Scott Burton through Bon Iver trombonist Reggie Pace. (Carey’s brother Sean also plays in Bon Iver.) They bring fresh elements to her sound, including notes of jazz and the mbira, an African finger piano Wolfe brought back from his travels.

Carey’s family members and friends contributed to her first album, but she wanted to find musicians to play the songs live with her.

“I still write the songs, but they do all of the instrumentation,” Carey says. “I bring a song a practice or send it to them and they write their parts and then we all work on it together.”

Recorded at D.C.’s Rock & Roll Hotel, the EP — out Nov. 17 — includes a “space-agey” remix of the single, courtesy of Snow Panda. (Stream the remix below.)

“The whole thing sounds really trippy, but really interesting,” Carey says of the remix. “We told Snow Panda to have total freedom with the strong and do what he thought sounded cool. It’s really different from what we normally do, but really fun. Kind of whimsical.”

Luray performs Nov. 8 at 2206 1st St. NW in D.C.

Burhenn has gone through big personal changes lately, including a move to Los Angeles (from Omaha, Nebraska) and a difficult breakup. She says it had been her longest relationship yet.

“I think our generation particularly struggles with intimacy and the concept of long-term relationships,” says Burhenn, who used to play in D.C. indie-pop band Georgie James. “We’re a generation who — most of us — are a product of divorced families, and I think we just don’t have faith in long-term love.”

But Burhenn says she hasn’t lost all of her faith. A couple of songs on the album — including “Semantics” and opener “All My Heart” — express being heartbroken while holding onto hope.

“‘Semantics,'” Burhenn says, “is about arguing with a lover — or even with yourself — [about whether] the glass [is] half full or half empty. At the end of the day, someone might say, ‘Well, it’s the same amount of water. It doesn’t matter what you call it,’” Burhenn says. “I’m like, ‘No, it does matter.’ In order to be hopeful… you have to espouse that whole philosophy.”

Both the album’s lyrics and music depart dramatically from her band’s 2012 album, GENERALS.

“I’m a big fan of artists who aren’t afraid to delve into new types of music, and even take on whole new personas album to album,” Burhenn says. “People like David Bowie or PJ Harvey.”

This album, Burhenn says, feels dreamier and more lush. It sounds more electronic, drawing from the 1980s and ‘90s, and touches on a few different themes. GENERALS was much more politically charged, raw and rhythmic.

“On my album GENERALS, I was asking this question: ‘What can we do in the face of so many things that are wrong in the world, and what is it that can make us feel or be powerful individually?’” Burhenn says.

Asking that question led to an awakening.

“At the end of the album I kind of came to the answer: love. Love is the answer,” she says. “And I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s so trite.’ But I think it kind of set me up to make an album of love songs.”

The Mynabirds play U Street Music Hall Sept. 26. See the band perform “Wildfire” live for KEXP.

The party decor doesn’t feel out of place. This is a celebration. It’s the first anniversary of Babe City Records, a D.C.-based record and cassette label that captures the new sound of the city’s indie-rock scene — and the show is nearly sold out.

Formerly associated with Chimes Records, Babe City was spearheaded by musicians and fans who wanted to carve out a place for themselves in independent music. Now the label is on a mission to help other local bands do the same.

The label’s Jon Weiss, 24, and Peter Lillis, 28, are also musicians: They both appeared onstage during the anniversary show, handling guitar in Jules Hale’s band Den-Mate. (Weiss also sings in Babe City group The Sea Life.) Weiss and Lillis play major roles behind the scenes, too: They quite literally live Babe City, which shares its name with their group house and DIY venue in D.C.’s Dupont Circle neighborhood. The guys moved into the house in August 2014 and started hosting shows the following month.

Co-founded by Erik Cativo (aka Erik Strander) and Weiss, Babe City is now operated by a small group of friends. Cativo and Weiss handle key roles behind the scenes, including production and booking, respectively. Lillis serves as the label’s publicity guru. More help comes from Kevin Sottek, a member of Babe City signees Witch Coast, who’s the label’s art director; Jen Pape, who recently joined as a project manager; and Michael Andrade — an occasional Bandwidth contributor — who’s Babe City’s official photographer.

“We’re all nerds about something,” Lillis says. “Everyone comes into it with their own background and passion and it fills out all the space in between.”

Babe City likes to be inclusive. For the 9:30 Club gig, the label roped in D.C. bands The Max Levine Ensemble and The El Mansouris, poppy rock ensembles with no official tie to the label. With the slogan “everyone’s a babe at Babe City,” the imprint doesn’t want to be thought of as male-oriented or sexist (though the anniversary gig’s lineup was heavily male).

Weiss says David Combs, the longtime leader of The Max Levine Ensemble (and also a Bandwidth contributor), was his first musical role model when he first started to probe the D.C. music scene at age 16. “Having him on this show was awesome,” says Weiss, a Rockville native who’s only eight years younger than Combs.

In an indie-rock scene as transient as D.C.’s, it doesn’t take long for scenesters to become elder statesmen. Weiss has been involved with The Sea Life for eight years, and he thought his experience could be helpful to rising bands like Young Rapids. The musician says his desire to support other local groups was a major impetus behind Babe City’s creation.

“When you have this album that you’re proud of and you can’t put it out, or you don’t know how to put it out, or you don’t have direction for it,” Weiss says, “it’s very defeating.”

Lillis agrees. He says Babe City is here to help.

“Bands can get bogged down in the non-music stuff from recording, to booking shows, even finding a place to practice,” Lillis says. “There are so many logistics that can be a detriment to bands. We want to let them be the musicians, and we’ll get the rest of it done for them.”

Now Babe City wants to take its mission a step further. They want to work on getting their music licensed for media, sign more out-of-state bands and grow into a national — as well as local — label. And they’d like to expand into vinyl.

“[Vinyl] is our favorite format,” Weiss says. “We don’t want to be just a cassette label. Most of the labels we look up to are primarily vinyl. To be viewed by them as peers would be an awesome goal for us.”

But while the 9:30 Club gig felt like a party, both Weiss and Lillis say the work has just begun.

“We’re happy and excited, but we’re not patting ourselves on the back,” Weiss says. “We’re not ready to do that yet. We want to just use it as motivation and validation to work harder.”

Second photo: The Sea Life at 9:30 Club, by Michael Andrade

The original version of this post contained errors and imprecise language. Due to a reporting error, it incorrectly identified Peter Lillis, who works on the label, as a co-founder. (Jon Weiss and Erik Cativo are co-founders.) Second, due to an editing error, we described Babe City as a cassette label, but that’s not entirely accurate: It has released music both on vinyl and cassette. Third, Babe City is better described as an affiliate — not a direct descendant — of Chimes Records. Finally, we first referred to Young Rapids as “younger” than The Sea Life, but that wasn’t the best word choice. We meant the band has existed for less time. The language has been corrected.

So McLaughlin embarked on a two-week trip to Thailand, where she started writing the music for her soon-to-be-released album, Spirit House. One album cut, “Kapunkah” (listen below), is McLaughlin’s phonetic rendering of how to say “thank you” as a woman in Thailand, and it encapsulates several personal experiences there.

“A lot of my songs are created through a stream of consciousness,” says McLaughlin. “I would be walking around and I would be singing and eating mangoes or finding spiders under our bed or walking through tall grass and turning it, eventually, into one full song.”

McLaughlin describes “Kapunkah” as joyful and rhythmically explosive, with grooves and danceable riffs on the guitar and additional bass, drums and percussion courtesy of Ethan Foote — who wrote arrangements for the album — and other ensemble members.

Even the name Spirit House was inspired by Thailand: McLaughlin says that she saw tons of tiny dollhouse-like shrines during her travels there.

“When people are building a home or piece of property [in Thailand] they also build a spirit house,” McLaughlin says. “I believe they build it in order to give the spirit a place to live. That idea resonated with me, because the songs felt like little spirits that were living within me. I thought that, ‘Oh, if I make an album, I’ll have a little spirit house for these songs to reside in.’”

Marian McLaughlin plays album release shows Sept. 4 at Creative Alliance in Baltimore and Sept. 23 at Capital Fringe in D.C.