Ocobaya – Messix
Matt Chaconas – AEIOU
Smoke Bellow – Conscious Heads
Sun Machines – Mare Island
Drop Electric – Santo Domingo
A Tale Of – 1976
Nitemoves – Grinder
Lo-Fang – Animal Urges
Maxine – Since I Lost You
Damu the Fudgemunk – 1993 Pete, 45 Mix
Mathugh – The Hitcher
Catscan! – Marine Biologist
Patuxent Partners – Victoria Waltz
Art Sorority For Girls – All Year Again (Yoko O.K.)
Buildings – For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky
Opus Akoben – Ronin
SCANNERS – Petty Tragedy
Andrew Grossman – Death to Rockville Pike
Reginald Cyntje – Wind

Some of this year’s most unforgettable local songs didn’t come from comfortable experiences. They sounded fed up, and particularly urgent in a year marked by growing inequity at home and multiple slayings by police in places that didn’t feel far away.

In one of the year’s rawest rock songs, Thaylobleu cranked up its guitars to tell a personal story of police harassment. Chain and the Gang and Jack On Fire assailed gentrification with wit and hyperbole. Punk band Priests declared everything right wing. Two remarkable hip-hop works channeled frustration and fatalism among young black Americans: Diamond District’s Oddisee cried, “What’s a black supposed to do — sell some crack and entertain?”, while Virginia MC GoldLink rapped about all the glorious things he imagines happening to him — when he dies.

Not that peace and love felt impossible in 2014: In a touching song released two years after his death, Chuck Brown sang of a “beautiful life” enriched by the warmth of community. Promising newcomer Kali Uchis made us kick back with a soulful number steeped in giddy infatuation. Experimentation thrived in D.C. music: Young artists built on the region’s strong punk pedigree and expanded its boundaries. Mary Timony’s band Ex Hex embraced a classic sound and made one of the country’s best rock ‘n’ roll records. Local bands with shorter but distinctive resumes — like Laughing Man, Two Inch Astronaut and Deleted Scenes — sounded better and more creative than ever before. A Sound of Thunder and Gloom reminded us that the D.C. area is still a reliable producer of top-notch metal.

As expected, Bandwidth contributors faced hard choices while making this list of the year’s best local songs, and not only because it’s our first one. Up until deadline, we were still hearing new D.C. songs we wanted to include. But in a place where mounting wealth has created a challenging environment for art, that’s not a problem, really. It’s a testament to a music scene that perseveres despite long odds. —Ally Schweitzer

Warning: Many of these songs contain explicit lyrics.

Now Tyler-Ameen has unveiled “Dead Man,” another track that bodes well for his band’s forthcoming album, Older Boys. It doesn’t bang out a hook as gluey as “Man With a Van,” but this one might linger past its runtime for a different reason: It’s heavy stuff.

Passionately delivered heavy stuff, at that—in the raw, bleeding spirit of D.C.’s Rites of Spring, but with the aggressive acoustic strumming of the emo that followed. Tyler-Ameen (who works at NPR) describes it as “more gestural” than anything he’s written before.

“The lyrics are pretty oblique; there aren’t many punchlines. And it’s a rough thing, made to be shouted,” the musician writes in an email. “In rehearsals we could only play it once per session; the drum part [Joshua Gottesman] came up with was so physically shredding that his hands and arms would swell and ache for minutes afterwards. When we recorded the vocal, our engineer, Thomas Orgren, turned off all the lights in the live room, which I think helped coax the throat-scraping finale out of me.”

It may be wise to listen to the song in the dark, too—“Dead Man” could easily tempt out a few tears. “This song definitely comes out of the anxiety and doubt by which many young people feel assailed when their role models let them down, especially when said role model is one’s own father,” he writes. (Art Sorority for Girls’ 2011 song “My Father” touched on a similar issue.)

The tune bears so much emotional intensity, it was enough to worry Tyler-Ameen’s pals. “When I first started performing it, a couple of friends and even my own drummer asked for backstory, their voices and faces carrying a hint of ‘Are you OK?'”

Art Sorority For Girls’ LP Older Boys comes out Oct. 1. The band plays D.C. on Oct. 19. Venue to be announced.

“Man With a Van” speaks from the viewpoint of a jilted New York, resentful of Tyler-Ameen’s move south. “There’s this subconscious voice about the city incarnate judging you for leaving it,” says the songwriter, a New York native who now works here at NPR. “It may not have anything to do with reality, but the city is bitter and jealous. It takes glee in imagining your downfall.” In his telling, New York doesn’t handle rejection well. “Though it’s still too close to call,” he sings, “there’s bets on how you’ll lose it all.”

Tyler-Ameen wrote half of “Man With a Van” in New York, and the other half in D.C. years later. The space between writing led to interesting contrasts—and some mistakes—on his forthcoming record. “I regret that on this album I refer to women as ‘girls,'” Tyler-Ameen says. It’s to his credit that he kept the old lyrics. Like some of the band’s other songs, it comes across as a snapshot of youth and the self-doubt that can come with it. The voice of an angry New York sounds a lot like a young man’s own anxiety.

The snappy chorus goes, “It’s nice to see you, and how have you been? The man with the van is a friend of a friend.” What does that mean? “It’s a coded message that’s a message to your future self, but you don’t have the wisdom to fully understand it,” the musician says. That refrain also happens to be a vicious earworm, a flash of poetry amid poppy guitar strumming.

After releasing his first record as a solo project, Art Sorority For Girls’ followup album—no title yet—ropes in drummer Joshua Gottesman and bassist Casey Holford. Does it mean the songwriter has found a home in D.C.?

Perhaps. But it also sounds like New York isn’t done with him yet. “You are made of what I gave you/You know that as well as I,” he sings. “Tell San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., you are marked and rights-protected/Best believe you haven’t seen the last of me.”