Ken & Brad Kolodner – Skipping Rocks
Wildhoney – My Disguise
Otis Infrastructure – Oxbow
Will Spelker – He Was Mensa
Roger Aldridge – Samba Da Aguia Pescadora
Sonnet Cottage – A Million Voices
Sansyou – Let It Expand
Kingsley Flood – Cavalry
Eva Cassidy – Fields of Gold
Dupont Brass – Slow Jamz
Zenon Slawinski – Zango Revisited
Dawit Eklund – Psycho Animus
MILK$ – Wonder Woman
Beautiful Swimmers – Swimmers Groove
Brian Forehand – Moonroof
Wylder – Swells
Damu the Fudgemunk – Supply For Demand – Instrumental
Empresarios – No Vamos A Parar
WonderChurch – A Head In a Lion’s Mouth
Power Pirate – Infecting Us

Get ready for a dad-joke groan: Not all the beautiful swimmers are in Rio this week. D.C. dance-music duo the Beautiful Swimmers was in Europe recently for Amsterdam’s annual Dekmantel Festival — one of the primary tastemaking events on the European summer scene — and buzz about the performance was strong. (It’s hardly the first time they were on the bill.) There’s evidence: a joyously funky one-minute clip on Instagram that features a mix of Sheila E.’s “Love Bizarre.” (The bearded one is Andrew Field-Pickering, aka Maxmillion Dunbar, and the one in the black T-shirt is Ari Goldman.) For an extra taste of what the Swimmers are generally up to, here’s a mix they did for the Dekmantel organization:

The duo is back in D.C. this weekend, for a show at Flash nightclub on Aug. 13, followed by a performance on Aug. 20 at the Petworth Summer Jam series with DJs from D.C.’s 1432R label.

Screen Vinyl Image – The Midnight Sun
The Orchid – Decompressor/The Last Dive
Jon Camp – All Is Fine Past the County Line
Aaron Agre – Time Window
Dissonance – Chlorophyll Daffodil
Elijah Cole – Green Dolphin Street
The Jet Age – The Only Difference
NUNS – False Architect
The Funk Ark – Bouzouki Song
2nd Story Band – Junior
Beautiful Swimmers – Running Over
Sriram Gopal – Bengali Dhun
Exit Vehicles – Paint
K-Loe Black – 144 Thousand
Wicked Olde – Old Joe Clark
MUDGE – Adora Jar
Flasher – Tense
Romantic States – Hourglass
Q and Not U – Wonderful People
Pilesar – Stickbag 1ne

Logikbomb – The Heights (aka: Her Lips)
Suzanne Brindamour – The Arrival
Den-Mate – For Free
Lungfish – Constellations
Wye Oak – Dogs Eyes
Screen Vinyl Image – Edge of Forever
Jonny Grave – Afraid of the Dark
Brûlée – Driftin’
Fat Kneel – Solaris
Marvin Gaye – What’s Happening Brother
Oddisee – In Your Eyes
Sansyou – Best Ones Choose You
AXB – Flea Markets
The Sea Life – Prozac & Merlot
Lance Neptune – Umbrella Girl.
Beautiful Swimmers – The Zoo
G-Flux – Cumbia Cosmica
Bucky’s Fatal Mistake – Hello
Aaron Gage – Vinayaka
They’ll Have Dreams – Walk to Freedom

Jonathan Parker – Colin’s Song
Troy and Paula Haag – Maybe It Was Me
Lands – Polyonymous
We Were Pirates – Transmorgified
Birds and Buildings – East Is Fort Orthodox
Elijah Jamal Balbed – Lament For Booker
Justin Jones – So Much You’ll Never Know (make me the moon pt. 2)
Le Loup – To the Stars! To the Night!
Wytold – Folk Song of the Steel People
Three Man Soul Machine – Golden Thread
Akua Allrich – I Can’t Stand the Rain
Thievery Corporation – Indra
Marvin Gaye – Right On
Ephemeral Sun – Prism
Greenland – East of Eden Center
Bobby Thompson – Be Your Love
Miss Shevaughn & Yuma Wray – Election Year Blues
Beautiful Swimmers – Swimmers Groove
Hailu Mergia – Shilela
Annette Wasilik and the Wonder Band – You Are Free

It’s a “utility thing,” the D.C. producer and DJ says about the no-frills tracks he releases as Dolo Percussion, including four he’s freshly dropped this week on the appropriately titled Dolo Percussion 2 EP. The energetic drum knocks and inviting bass tones maintain the core personality of the boundary-stretching funky music he makes as Maxmillion Dunbar, but without a lot of the far-out facets.

And by utility, Field-Pickering means that before any Dolo cuts are released on vinyl, he’s been using them — typically burned onto CDs — in DJ sets as Max D or with Beautiful Swimmers, his askew house-music duo with Ari Goldman. And with functionality as his motivation, he often finds himself pushed into a simpler headspace.

“With Max things, there’s infinite options, but with Dolo … you can get something wrong — it’s not gonna work unless you put a little bit of function to it,” he says. “I don’t ever think of a Max song as having a wrong way to go, but a Dolo thing can definitely be like, ‘Nah, this is not gonna work.’ It’s kinda cool because it’s this thing that talks back to you, almost.”

Dolo Percussion 2, on Field-Pickering’s own Future Times label, follows the format of 2013’s Dolo Percussion EP on New York’s L.I.E.S. label: four tracks, titled sequentially and generally presented in the order Field-Pickering created them.

“It’s utilitarian down to even the mixing, sometimes,” he says. “There’s pretty clear high, mid and bass things, like in terms of just the drum blocks — they’ll mix in with any record, it’s a bridge to anything else you’ll want to play.”

Field-Pickering says he typically shares the tracks with an inner circle of DJ friends once he’s had a chance to work them into his own sets for awhile. The response, as he describes it, is fittingly minimal.

“There’s a lot of exclamation-type things,” he says. Just like, ‘Whoo!’ You know, like, I get an email back, like, ‘Whoo! I can use that! Whoo!’”

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.