“It’s sort of a meta-reflection on what it means to lose something that you thought was yours, the thing that makes you whole or your masculinity complete,” says multi-instrumentalist Austin Gallas, 26. “Because an obelisk is essentially just a big c**k in the air.”

But as playful as it may be, “Luxor Obelisk” broaches a serious issue in many relationships: an imbalance of power.

“It’s really a love story, exploring what it means to have feelings of possession and ownership over someone, and sort of taking a jab at male possessiveness,” says Gallas, who lives in D.C.’s Columbia Heights neighborhood.

The song showcases the contributions of Gallas and collaborators Erik Sleight (also of Stronger Sex and Br’er) and Ben Schurr (Br’er, Pree) in equal measure.

“Ben has done a lot of really rough industrial noise stuff on it, and Erik was really into crafting a lot of cool fancy synth parts,” Gallas says. “Then I sort of arranged the song and did the vocals, but I think it’s a good all-around display of what we’re up to.”

What they’re up to is using odd instrumentation — like a mandolin played through a series of pedals — to create a blend of deep swooning drones and sparkling synths, hiding a driving dance beat that detonates halfway through the track.

“[The song] really builds up and then eventually explodes in a way that none of the other songs do,” says Gallas. “It starts in one way and then it totally turns into something else halfway through and kind of lets loose.”

Because of the song’s dynamics, Gallas points out that it’s one of their most fun tracks to perform live.

“It allows us to be a bit experimental with the structure,” Gallas says. “It’s not too confined to the logic of the song, so we have a lot of fun with it live. It really gets big and juicy.”

CrushnPain plays May 19 at The Commune.

The title track from Masking, the forthcoming album from D.C. ensemble Br’er, could hardly be called easy listening. With throbbing industrial beats and vocals that alternate between screams and moans, “Masking” oozes the kind of discomfort that’s easy to get excited about.

Now Br’er has a new video for “Masking” that, like the song, is equal parts sexy and scary.

Filmed at The Beehive (a D.C. house venue that’s also Br’er’s practice space) and produced by drummer Ben Usie, the video is supposed to be disorienting: There are numerous spliced-together shots of band members’ faces and a strange narrative about a man being kidnapped and slapped in the face with fistfuls of snow.

Rather than try to make sense of it all, kicking back and soaking this up seems like the way to go. Br’er songwriter and vocalist Ben Schurr calls it “an exercise in [the] transcendence of submission.”

Br’er plays an album-release show at The Pinch Oct. 8.

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.

That’s what it’s supposed to sound like. “The song kind of sums up the feelings that you get when you go to the club in the wrong state of mind,” says Schurr, a 29-year-old Petworth resident. “I wanted to have a club song that sounded like you’re having the worst time in the entire world, but you still wanted to dance and freak out to it.”

While living in Philadelphia—and after fighting with his then-girlfriend—Schurr wrote a 10-minute song that eventually became the much shorter final product. “I started messing around on my synthesizer and created this really weird, dissociative, nauseating drone,” he says. “The whole song is just us chopping up that drone.”

“Masking” draws heavily on Schurr’s early love of industrial and electronic music. It packs in more aggression than Br’er’s earlier releases, which he wrote when he was listening to more classical and early goth stuff. During a one- or two-year-long break from Br’er, Schurr—who also plays in the poppier band Pree—produced a lot of other projects, focusing primarily on rhythms and grooves. When he finally returned to Br’er, he began to incorporate more experiments with drum machines and electronics into his work.

Despite being a mostly electronic song, “Masking”—and the 2015 album it will appear on—is firmly grounded in the human experience. “The whole point of the record is to focus on the way that people distance themselves from each other by having to cope in social situations and repress a lot of human feelings,” Schurr says. “Almost all of the songs are about observations of people who are just masking to one another and how terribly they treated each other as a result.”

In addition to introducing a new sound to the band, Masking marks the beginning of a newly collaborative writing process for Br’er. Schurr previously handled most of the songwriting, but this new record pulls in more input from fellow members John Delascio, Ben Usie and Erik Sleight. “This is, to me, the four of us working together to make the record,” Schurr says. “So it’s the first step [toward] a full band, as opposed to a project I was doing where I would just… get somebody to play strings for me.”