The group had creative differences, says frontman Massama Dogo. “Other guys in the band wanted to do more of a Fela [Kuti] thing,” he says, referring to the Nigerian Afrobeat star. But Dogo wanted to play bouncier rhythms from Togo, his native country.

Plus, everybody in the band was sick of playing small venues. “If we could play bigger clubs,” Dogo says, “it would give the band and the fans more energy.”

The band duked it out in a tense meeting earlier this year. By its end, a surprising thing had happened: Elikeh had written a new song.

That track is called “The Conversation,” and it opens Elikeh’s new EP, Kondona, out Nov. 20 on Ropeadope. Friday, the group celebrates its release at D.C.’s Rock & Roll Hotel.

Dogo may be unenthused about playing yet another intimate venue, but if he is, he doesn’t let on. He says the group is taking other steps to keep their mojo working.

“What we want do now is to focus more on the style of the music than what we are talking about,” he says.

That’s a big step for a songwriter whose lyrics — often in the Togo languages Ewe and Mina, but occasionally in French and English — have tackled substantive issues in the past. The son of a government minister, Dogo has warbled about political corruption and the late South African leader Nelson Mandela.

Elikeh is a multinational band that includes a Nigerian lead guitarist, a Ghanaian percussionist and a bassist, keyboardist, drummer and horn players from the U.S. The group started as a solo project for Dogo, who came to D.C. in 2000 and recruited local players to record Nyade, his first album as Elikeh. Elikeh became a true band later on, releasing Adje!Adje! in 2010 and following up with Between Two Worlds in 2012.

Stylistically, the group skews old-school: It draws from ’60s and ’70s West African rhythms including Togolese agbadja and kamou, Ghanaian highlife and Nigerian Afrobeat tinged with jazz and funk. Their slightly throwback style doesn’t woo many young African immigrants in the D.C. region, who dance to Auto-Tuned African pop at clubs like Fire Station 1.

“Some people do listen to that kind and us, but most of them do not,” Dogo says. “It goes with style. They don’t dress traditional African. We are a band who uses African cultural stuff and mixes it with who we are.”

Elikeh’s new material has a strong basis in Togolese culture. Kondona is named after a Togo initiation ceremony that welcomes young men into the adult part of the community. Dogo attended one in his home village this summer. While crafting the EP at House of Jam recording studio in Beltsville, Maryland, he also incorporated sounds from that ceremony, as well as drumming from percussionists he’d recorded back home.

“We kind of produce ourselves. We don’t have an engineer here who is familiar with agbadja Togo music, and that is the direction we want to go now,” Dogo says.

Dogo thinks that Elikeh has taken steps that will expand its audience as the group prepares to release a full-length on Ropeadope next year. He says that featuring Malian musician Vieux Farka Touré and Furthur guitarist John Kadlecik on Elikeh’s 2012 record helped them reach new people. The group also aims to find an agent who can help book gigs in new places — something other than small rock clubs.

“We have the dedication to doing the grassroots thing,” he says, “but if you do it too long, that’s where the frustration comes in.”

It seems like Elikeh’s near-breakup helped Dogo and his bandmates in the long run. But on “The Conversation,” the band tells the story of its turning point with music, not words.

“We didn’t think lyrics could represent what happened that day,” says Dogo, “so we thought about having a horn and a trumpet express that.”

Elikeh plays an EP release show Nov. 6 at Rock & Roll Hotel.

The result is Man Is A Monster, by D.C. ensemble The Funk Ark, which takes its Afrobeat-rooted, Latin-infused global funk in darker, riskier directions. Bandleader Rast became a keyboardist for Antibalas—the Brooklyn-based band that turned him on to the U.S. Afrobeat revival—about a year and a half ago, and the new gig inevitably had effects on The Funk Ark, he says. Paying homage became less of a concern.

“It’s funny that it took me joining the band that I idolized so much to kind of start getting away from trying to recreate it,” says Rast, 33. “But that’s pretty much what happened.”

The results are clear on the new album’s title track, which has a firm Afrobeat foundation—thick brass, repetitive guitar motifs, aggressively funky rhythms and a fiery solo by baritone saxophonist Matt Rippetoe—but has strong currents of ’80s pop sounds. Those thundering drums that cut into the funk? Phil Collins’ “In The Air Tonight” was definitely in mind, Rast says.

The band’s two percussionists, Graham Doby and John Speice, took every tom-tom from all the drum sets in the studio—”at least six or seven sets,” Rast says—and lined them up. They faced each other and traded off measures. So did it look kind of comical, or just plain cool?

“It was both,” Rast says. “Something so ridiculous as getting all the tom-toms in the studio and setting them up and having these two guys facing each other, doing a drum-off, is pretty hilarious. You could think of it as hilarious, and you could think of it as serious, and then you could think of it as hilarious.”

The song’s title is definitely serious, though. It doesn’t point to any specific indignity, Rast says, just a general sociopolitical and environmental sense that it’s “all kind of slipping away.” He originally wanted to have someone write lyrics for the song, but nothing felt right, and the band went ahead with it as an instrumental.

The main horn-section melody and keyboard lines retain the feeling that they were written to back up a human voice; it’s easy to hear them as forceful oration. In Rast’s mind, “Man Is A Monster” conjures a setting where mankind already has done maximum damage to itself.

“My visual image of that song is this calm, utopian place where all the people are gone,” he says. “It’s a different reality, it’s the future.”

The Funk Ark plays an album release show tonight at Black Cat.