Formed by guitarist/singer Homero Salazar Andrujovich and keyboardist/singer Maria Sage in 2011, the dream-pop outfit hit a series of stumbling blocks while recording its debut album, Glaziao.

“It’s hard to find the right and committed people to form a band,” Andrujovich says. Amid multiple lineup changes, sessions for Glaziao stretched across two years. He and Sage finished the album in 2015, but without a stable group of players, they felt unsure about next steps.

“It seems pointless to release an album and not [be] able to tour [on] it,” says Andrujovich. “We went into a hiatus trying to determine what to do.”

After finally solidifying into a quintet — with drummer Ryan Witt, guitarist Hays Dowdy and bassist Andrew Bezila — Go Cozy released its album and hit the road. Then their tour van was burglarized in Chicago.

“Luckily no gear was stolen, but it was the night before 4/20 and we had great plans to camp and chill hard,” says singer/guitarist Homero Salazar Andrujovich. “All of our cannabis and clothes were taken away.”

The band recovered their losses through generous donations from fans and its label, D.C.’s Babe City Records — and Andrujovich, 28, hasn’t let the experience bum him out. “It was a huge blessing to be on the road meeting so many cool people around the country,” he says.

Go Cozy’s record shares Andrujovich’s laid-back attitude in the face of difficulty. Named after a word that refers to perfect surf conditions in Andrujovich’s childhood home of Puerto Rico, Glaziao is as mellow as a day at the beach. But tension lurks underneath. Andrujovich and Sage’s lyrics dwell on relationship mishaps and persistent feelings of nostalgia, while the shimmering accompaniment drifts unexpectedly across oblong song structures.

The band started out simpler. “We discovered that some of our favorite contemporary albums have been produced on GarageBand in the artist’s bedroom,” says Andrujovich. “I started experimenting, and we came up with songs.” He and Sage began making the record with producer Tommy Sherrod in 2013.

These days, Andrujovich is optimistic about the band’s future — and cautiously eager to get back on the road, having learned a key tour lesson the hard way.

“Never park two blocks away from the venue,” he says.

Go Cozy plays May 8 at Songbyrd Music House.

“It was time for us to leave,” emails Peter Lillis, a Babe City resident who runs the label’s publicity. According to Lillis, Babe City met the same fate as dozens of D.C. house venues before it: The property at 22nd and N streets NW is being “gutted and flipped and sold for big money,” he writes.

Lillis says he and his roommates have moved to a house near Fort Totten Metro. (For privacy reasons, he asked Bandwidth not to publish the address.)

After Babe City began hosting basement shows last fall, the spot became one of D.C.’s most reliable hosts of underground, rock-skewing bands, putting on at least a few gigs a month. Raucous New Paltz punk duo Diet Cig played there twice this year; pop-rock Virginians RDGLDGRN packed the basement in July.

When Jon Weiss (of The Sea Life and Witch Coast) and Erik Strander launched Babe City Records, the house became its headquarters.

But the location — in one of D.C.’s most expensive neighborhoods — felt temporary from the beginning, Lillis points out. “As much as we love it, [Babe City] was never meant to be our permanent home,” he writes. “We quickly outgrew the space, with five people living in a three-bedroom house, and many bands operating out of our living room and basement.”

Moving elsewhere promises to be a money-saver. “We were happy to move to a more comfortable (and cheaper) home up in north D.C.,” Lillis writes.

The second incarnation of Babe City hosts a kickoff show Dec. 27 featuring Babe City act Den-Mate, San Francisco’s Sports and a solo version of Maryland’s Go Cozy. Donations will be taken at the door.

In true punk-rock fashion, the residents of Babe City exited Dupont with little pomp and circumstance, Lillis says. “We packed and moved in the middle of the night with a 24-foot U-Haul,” he writes. “It was an experience.” 

Babe City II hosts its first show Dec. 27. See Facebook for details.

“Jon [Weiss] and Kevin [Sottek] were sad and smoking a lot of hash,” the garage-punk band writes, telling its origin story via email. Jordan Sanders joined on bass a year later, forming a three-piece. And that name? It’s an indirect reference to a TV show loved by teens in the ‘90s — and probably hash-smokers, too: Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

But forget its stoner origins and love of Buffy: Witch Coast is serious about being a band. So serious, in fact, it just released a debut album. Burnt Out By 3pm (listen below) is a tidy collection of 12 tracks, compiled on a cassette with a fetching marbled pattern they call “hellfire swirl.”

Asked why they went with a cassette tape, Witch Coast says the choice was easy. “[We] wanted to keep the analog production values intact, and [tapes are] the cheapest medium.”

There’s an out-of-left-field bonus that goes along with the tape, too: a foam finger flipping the bird. (“It is a novelty item,” the band clarifies, helpfully.)

The album was recorded quickly — during a single March afternoon at D.C. house venue Babe City, on a vintage tape machine. Witch Coast recorded live onto a quarter-inch tape they bought on Craigslist. The musicians limited themselves to three takes per track, they say, “in order to capture the raw live power of each song.”

The resulting sound is frantic — and that’s just how they like it.

“The idea was and kind of still is to make this project as minimal as possible,” emails Weiss, who sings and plays guitar. “No extra overdubs or bulls**t perfections that make you claw at your face trying to accomplish [them]; no deep contemplation of what a lyric should mean to me or an audience.” And it’s just four tracks, he says: guitar, bass, drums, vocals.

Witch Coast doesn’t tend to veer into the weeds during the creative process, either. The band sometimes struggles to write new material, “but when we start an idea, a skeleton of a song, we’ll have it finished in 30 minutes,” says Weiss, who also plays in The Sea Life.

“Sometimes we have practices that are these incredible writing sessions,” Weiss adds, “and sometimes we have practices where we’ll all trash our instruments and walk out.”

But there’s nothing wrong with that, the frontman clarifies.

“That’s what Witch Coast is,” he writes. “Mistakes and emotions.”

Witch Coast’s Burnt Out By 3pm is available through Babe City Records.

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.

Released on Year of the Manatee, the quartet’s forthcoming full-length tape on Babe City Records, “Go Bi” (listen below) finds singer/guitarist Dave Lesser rethinking his sexuality, prompted by complex circumstances — specifically, two difficult relationships. One of his previous girlfriends moved back to the Midwest. Another died of cancer.

“I was thinking… this is really hard,” says Lesser, 30, in a phone interview. “Wait a minute: there’s a whole segment of the population [men] I haven’t even considered. What would it be like if I were to write this character and sing a song about this character?”

So “Go Bi” finds its narrator considering his options. If women aren’t working out, what about men?

“Relationships with women always seem to end in disaster/Some run home to Ohio, others, they die of cancer,” Lesser sings. “I do not know which is worse, but my friends have found an answer/Master my fears of the other gender and put in for a transfer.”

Lesser says that while all of his lyrics originate from some personal truth, his characters can take on a life of their own. That is to say, he didn’t actually fall in love with a guy as the song imagines. But he did explore the idea.

Written in 2011, “Go Bi” was originally supposed to appear on BRNDA’s first album, but it didn’t make the cut. It also had different music at first, according to the band’s bass player, John Gardner.

“It’s the second incarnation of the song,” says Gardner, 35. “[Year of the Manatee] is also a transitional album because it has older songs written by Dave but also newer songs that were written more collaboratively and organically.”

As for the lyrics, Gardner says he knows a lot of bi people who feel a bit disconnected from the straight community as well as lesbian and gay communities. He’d like to think of “Go Bi” as a sort of “bi anthem.” (Though, not all band members agree the song could be called an anthem for bisexuality or anything else.)

But Lesser’s thoughts about the lyrics are still evolving. He says he probably wouldn’t write the same song today; he’d be more nuanced and careful about his implications. It wasn’t until a recent conversation with Gardner — who identifies as queer — that he gave the tune more thought.

“One thing that never occurred to me was that I could be subtly implying that it is a choice to ‘go bi,’ and that was never my intention at all,” Lesser says. “I would actually feel very bad if it was assumed that someone could just choose to date men or women. But at the same time I was writing it I was thinking, ‘Hey, this was a hard time in my life. What if I tried something different?’”

BRNDA plays an album release show July 30 at Black Cat.

This post has been updated to add that not all members of BRNDA agree that “Go Bi” could be called a “bi anthem.”