Except for a few rarities, it’s not hard to find music from Dischord Records. The seminal D.C. punk-rock label co-founded by Ian MacKaye keeps its titles in print and its online store well-stocked — and the imprint jumped on the digital bandwagon long ago.

Nevertheless, news that the 36-year-old label is uploading its catalog to Bandcamp will probably prompt shrieks of joy from Dischord devotees.

The label has already posted Fugazi’s entire discography on the digital music service, plus a huge chunk of everything it’s ever released, dating back to 1980. Yep, Flex Your Head is there. So is Lungfish. Minor Threat. Rites of Spring. Q and Not U. Black Eyes. Nation of Ulysses. Name your favorite Dischord album, and there’s a good chance it’s now on Bandcamp, streamable for free and downloadable for a very reasonable price.

I haven’t been able to confirm when or why Dischord began posting its catalog to Bandcamp — I’ll update when I find out — but label spokesperson Aaron Leitko (disclosure: we’re friends) writes in an email, “we should [have] the whole deal switched on by next week.”

Now, here’s some Slant 6 just because.

The trio’s forthcoming album, Bland In D.C., deals with the big stuff — late capitalism, gun culture, mass complacency — with cynicism and a generous dose of absurdity.

“They’re songs about existing in a consumerist capitalist world, from the perspective of someone who’s trying to get enlightened,” says Mike Andre, the band’s bassist, vocalist and chief songwriter. “Several of them are about money and shopping and accumulating things. Some are about violence or nihilism. And all are about deconstructing the ego identity inherent in these pursuits.”

Album standout “Goths N’ Vandals” brings these ideas into focus. While Andre and drummer Amanda Huron pogo around a two-note riff from guitarist Justin Moyer, the frontman juxtaposes lyrics about destitution in the streets with descriptions of a high-society bacchanalia. An ominous chorus forecasts the collapse of an empire. The message could apply to ancient Rome — or the present day.

As with the rest of Bland In D.C. — out April 1 on Lovitt Records — the song is fast, dissonant and performed in tight unison. Puff Pieces occasionally deviate into free-form chaos — like on the frenzied “Object Accumulation” and “Wondrous Flowers” — and when they do, it hits like a panic attack.

Anxiety permeates the album, though Andre says the band was just aiming for “a kind of whimsical ridiculousness.”

The band’s intentions are certainly evident in the album title, a cheeky nod to D.C. hardcore legends Bad Brains and their early ‘80s anthem, “Banned In D.C.” Puff Pieces take that sentiment of outsider frustration and update it for an era of widespread gentrification.

“Mike was walking to work one bright spring day amongst hordes of eager young professionals when the phrase ‘Bland in D.C.’ first crossed his mind,” says drummer Amanda Huron. “It seemed to perfectly encapsulate how we’ve been feeling about D.C., and being punks in D.C., and being in a band here. And somehow it seemed like a sentiment our fellow travelers would relate to.”

Puff Pieces boast a respectable D.C. punk pedigree, with members logging time in local bands Caution Curves, Antelope, Edie Sedgwick and El Guapo. The trio came together several years ago, originally as a one-off project.

“The stated intention was to record some songs, play five shows and then disband, as Amanda and I were preparing to move to China,” says Andre, 41. “We didn’t move to China, though, and the band is seemingly continuing on, thanks to some sort of blind inertia.”

Puff Pieces performs with Jack On Fire, Nice Breeze and Escape-ism March 19 at Songbyrd Music House.

The band made its debut with 2013 Nites of Midnite, a blistering LP that harks back to Washington’s ’80s hardcore heyday. Since then, Red Hare has been putting together the pieces of a second album. A piece of their new work, a fresh 7-inch called Lexicon Mist, arrives Tuesday.

“We work any way that we can, because we all have jobs, wives, lives, responsibilities, children,” says guitarist Jason Farrell, who lives in Los Angeles. “But this is still something that has meant something to us for longer than it hasn’t.”

On the record’s A-side, “Silverfish,” Red Hare explodes from every corner: Vocalist Shawn Brown barks with sharp clarity; Farrell draws blood from metal-tinged riffs; Dave Eight’s bass growls and drummer Joe Gorelick pops and punches on the kit.

But on the 7-inch’s B-side, Red Hare nods to a band that’s less prone to spontaneous combustion: Lungfish. “Sphere of Influence” pays homage to the deep and droning track from the Baltimore band’s 1996 record Sound in Time. For that one, Brown tones down his typical roar, channeling Daniel Higgs’ distinctive vocal style.

“It’s such a heavy song, not only musically, but spiritually,” says Brown.

The song reflects the personal challenge, Brown says, of “trying to juggle your desires to play music and still work and survive, and in some of our cases, raise a family and realizing that your time is short anyway.”

Lexicon Mist arrives Feb. 16 via Dischord and Hellfire Records.

Last month, Portlandia co-creator Fred Armisen reportedly sang the praises of D.C. label Dischord Records during a taping of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour. A few years back, he dropped references to D.C.’s punk scene on Portlandia.

Now the ex-Saturday Night Live cast member is showing once more that his love for the nation’s capital is true: The actor is scheduled to appear Friday at Red Onion Records in D.C.

According to Red Onion’s Facebook event, store staff have “no idea” what Armisen plans to do during his lunchtime appearance, “but it will be interesting.”

Drag City Records, which organized the event, doesn’t know exactly what Armisen has in mind, either. But label rep Kathryn Wilson says the actor’s D.C. appearance might resemble what he did in October at Santa Cruz shop Streetlight Records: songs from his fake soft-rock band The Blue Jean Committee (from Documentary Now) as well as other phony ensembles he’s invented in the past.

Wilson says Armisen will probably wind up doing a “super-minimal” set with either an acoustic or electric guitar at the U Street shop.

Red Onion owner Josh Harkavy says Drag City pitched him the Armisen in-store show last week. “I responded ‘heck yeah’ as quickly as possible,” he says.

Top image via YouTube.

Back in the toddler years of D.C.’s hardcore scene, Georgetown venue the Bayou was both loved and loathed.

On one hand, the Bayou was one of precious few D.C. clubs that would host punk bands like The Damned and Bad Brains, who played a now-legendary show at the venue in 1979. But punk kids in particular complained about the Bayou’s security staff, who had a reputation for being less than hospitable.

One of the groups coming up in that era was Youth Brigade, who both formed and broke up in 1981. As young punk kids who felt unwelcome at the Bayou — which closed in 1998 — they had opinions about the club’s bouncers. (As did Ian MacKaye, who called them “a**holes” in 2013 documentary The Bayou: D.C.’s Killer Joint.) So Youth Brigade decided to put those opinions on tape.

Called “Bouncer,” Youth Brigade’s 72-second Bayou diss track was recorded at Inner Ear Studios in Arlington. The song appears on Youth Brigade’s first demo, which MacKaye’s Dischord Records will release for the first time on Nov. 23.

Here’s what Youth Brigade’s Danny Ingram tells Brooklyn Vegan about “Bouncer”:

It’s about our experiences at the Bayou, a D.C. club that often employed locally stationed marines as bouncers/doormen, many of whom had a less than cordial relationship with the punks who attended the shows. The song was written right after the Bad Brains played there. I managed to get into the show, but Nathan’s fake ID was easily spotted and he was given the bum’s rush. Once I was in, I found the staff was their usual belligerent selves — hassling kids who were dancing and jumping about, all the while castigating those who didn’t drink. In those days, righteous indignation often wound up as a song at the very next rehearsal. Such is youth and such was the case with this song.

Listen to “Bouncer” below. Want to bark along? Here are the lyrics:

Bunch of ugly thugs
Await you at the door
Trying to take your drugs
Trying to make a score

You wanna see your favorite act
But you made a mistake
and you can’t come back
If they don’t like your looks,
you don’t get to see the show
Bayou bouncers, f*****g clowns,
really got to go

Got your friend
By his shirt
Trying to make him stand still

Take away
All your gear
And give you s**t
For not buying beer

Don’t be fooled: if you get inside
If you’re a punk, you better hide

The two captains of Soccer Team have been making music together for more than a decade, and their forthcoming album, Real Lessons in Cynicism, is a testament to the value of working as, well, a team.

Nelson and Quinley finish each other’s sentences, both in conversation and music. Nelson — who handles vocals, guitar and drums — brings an analog grit to Soccer Team’s sound. Quinley’s airy vocals lighten things up, while her bass keeps the band on strong rhythmic footing.

Nelson and Quinley met in the ‘90s, when they were both working at famed D.C. punk label Dischord Records.

“Melissa and I were sort of joined at the hip almost right away,” Nelson says.

Quinley, who moved to D.C. in ‘95 to work at the label, found a musical peer in Nelson.

“I very quickly realized that I trusted his recommendations,” Quinley says. “He was one of the few people I was comfortable around. I remember singing the first time and I was mortified — and he left the room and just let me do my thing.”

So Quinley kept exploring music with him. The duo took a break while Nelson attended school in Michigan for five years, but when he returned, they found their creative chemistry still intact.

“Right when Ryan came back, we put our 7-inch out, applied to South by Southwest, and started playing again,” Quinley says.

After Soccer Team released its debut, the 2006 LP “Volunteered” Civility and Professionalism, they had a few songs left over, Nelson says. They began recording Real Lessons in Cynicism in 2013. It’s expected out Oct. 27 on — what else? — Dischord Records.

For this album, Quinley and Nelson are joined by longtime collaborator and friend Jason Hutto (of The Aquarium) and Quinley’s husband, drummer Dennis Kane.

Nelson says he’s proud that on this album, “you can really hear a lot of each individual person’s contribution.” That’s especially true of “Friends Who Know.” Its lyrics are difficult to parse — Nelson calls it “one of the weirder songs on the record” — but the musical mojo is unmistakeable.

“So much of the stuff that Ryan writes, I immediately hear melodies,” Quinley says. “That doesn’t happen a lot.”

For years, “Friends Who Know” existed as fragments in Nelson’s mind, without lyrics.

“I feel awful but I’m just going to say it. If you ask me about any song on the record, I could tell you volumes about what the lyrics are about — with the exception of ‘Friends Who Know,’” Nelson says. “It’s crazy, but this song, it was pieces and fragments of other melodies that I had started and didn’t finish. Pieces just kept falling into place.”

Quinley agrees. The song sounds disjointed, but it possesses a strange magic.

“Everything to me aligns and works perfectly like it should,” the bassist says. “It is really beautiful… and the bass chords at end sound so badass.”

Soccer Team plays an album-release show Oct. 18 at Comet Ping Pong.

Stream “Too Many Lens Flares,” another single from Soccer Team’s second LP:

But J. Robbins, Jawbox’s ex-bandleader and guitarist, seems unimpressed with mythology.

“Making For Your Own Special Sweetheart —” the band’s 1994 major-label debut — “was like going to school, and sometimes it was very hard,” Robbins says. He’d realized the limitations of his guitar-playing. The band didn’t know how to navigate Atlantic Records’ bureaucracy. The record sold meekly, too, by major-label standards. Two years later, they took the lessons they’d learned and channelled them into Jawbox, a triumphant album by any measure. But it mattered little — the LP didn’t sail off the shelves. Come ‘97, Jawbox hung it up.

But Robbins never soured on those two albums, the group’s last of four. In 2009, DeSoto Records — operated by Jawbox bassist Kim Coletta — teamed up with Dischord Records to deliver a remastered version of For Your Own Special Sweetheart. And last week, the labels unleashed a freshened-up take on Jawbox’s swan song. Robbins says there isn’t a vast chasm between the Jawbox of 1996 and this new version.

“There’s so much about [Jawbox] that is like a time capsule,” Robbins says. “Even though there might be things I’d want to change, I think it’s silly to change it. It’s like, ‘No. This is really a record.’ As in, a record of a moment of our band firing on all cylinders creatively.”

It wasn’t always like that, not even with For Your Own Special Sweetheart, says Robbins, now a recording engineer in Baltimore. The band had imperfections, like uneven tempo changes that prompted producer Ted Niceley (who had worked with Fugazi on In On The Kill Taker and Repeater) to bring a metronome to their sessions.

“Luckily we had, like, seven weeks to make the record,” Robbins says.

When it came time for Jawbox to record the album that would be its last, the band members had developed an exacting attention to detail.

“Even when we were writing songs, there would be a tempo in mind and we would get in these heated discussions of whether something should be two BPM faster,” Robbins says. Jawbox had become more critical of its own work than producer John Agnello. (The musician recalls band members shaking their heads disapprovingly after hearing takes in the studio, tutting, “Oh, John. John, John, John. Didn’t you hear where Zach [Barocas] rushed the snare in the fourth bar of the second verse? That’s not cool.”)

Yet Robbins has fond memories of those Jawbox recording sessions. He speaks warmly of Agnello’s inspiring presence and discovered he and his bandmates could record quicker with their newfound maturity and efficiency. As such, the band was able to expand creatively, adding auxiliary percussion, organ and even a saxophone, courtesy of member Bill Barbot. Never mind that Atlantic kept pushing back the album’s timeline.

Robbins calls Jawbox’s placement on the major label and its TAG subsidiary “a cultural accident of timing.”

Now, the musician has nice things to say about the way music is released in 2015. He appreciates the Bandcamp model — which he used to release an EP last year — because it obliterates some of the excesses of superstardom that still prevail in music culture. For the Jawbox reissue, he wanted no bloat, no glitter.

The changes on Jawbox 2.0 are subtle, at most. It has updated artwork — a slight variation on the unsettling original, a photo of two fingers pointed toward a bowed head. (Jason Farrell — of Swiz and Bluetip — had to redo the cover because the band no longer has the original files.) Other than that, the only difference between 1996 Jawbox and the 15 songs reissued last week — Tori Amos cover included (stream below) — is a remastering courtesy of frequent Robbins collaborator Dan Coutant.

It’s surprising to hear, coming from a studio jockey, but Robbins says he couldn’t bear to do the job himself.

“Mastering gives me hives,” he says.

Jawbox’s self-titled album is available on vinyl, CD and digital formats through Dischord Records.

Davis and Richards — the Washington Post pop-music critic — began the indie-folk project Paint Branch in December 2010, releasing their first tunes under the name in 2012. This time, they sounded different, but the partnership felt the same.

“It seemed natural to work together again,” says Davis, 38, who’s also played in D.C. bands Georgie James and Title Tracks. “Chris said, ‘Hey, whenever you want to start your country band, let me know.’ We tried it, and it worked.”

On June 15, Paint Branch released its second set of recordings, a self-titled EP that recalls some of the recognizable sounds of Davis and Richards’ earlier work — two are new versions of songs that first appeared on the band’s full-length debut, I Wanna Live — but with a deeper exploration of folk, country and lyricism.

“We have a chemistry, because we’ve done this before… but it is still different, because this wasn’t the way we were writing songs before,” Davis says. “The way we are writing in Paint Branch is a distinct thing.”

The EP’s “a little bit country” feel isn’t just found in its music: Paint Branch recorded the release near Springfield, Virginia, on property owned by the duo’s pal, Elmer Sharp, who plays drums on the record. They tracked the songs in a shed fashioned into a studio.

Davis’ desire to hone in on songcraft is particularly evident in the EP’s opening track, “Patented Plagiarists” (listen below), which sets a tone that’s both mellow and subtly aggressive.

“The theme to that song is sort of in praise of people who do, and don’t say,” Davis says. “I like people — and maybe even strive to be someone — who just go and do it and don’t seek congratulations just because [they] showed up.”

But Davis acknowledges that his song could be heard in other ways.

“It’s hard to explain your own song, because hopefully the lyrics do that for you. But they don’t always,” the songwriter says. “What makes sense to you is a personal thing… and everyone projects their own interpretation onto the song.”

Paint Branch plays Red Onion Records July 19 and Paperhaus (as part of the In It Together Fest) July 30.

He’s from Baltimore and is in his early 50s. She’s from Stockholm, Sweden, and is in her late 20s. For a long time, Zomes was his solo project. She first joined him on 2013’s Time Was, but looking back, that album was more a proof of concept — a long hello. This time around, they spent several weeks in the fall of 2014 working in a little studio in his home, melding his minimalist, electric-organ-based post-punk tracks with her well-schooled and frequently wordless melodies.

“We knew we wanted to make our own record this time, and there was no reason to do anything other than just what we wanted to do,” says Osborne, known as the guitarist for Baltimore legends Lungfish. He brings that band’s repetitive, almost meditative power into Zomes. “We felt no rush — we could have meals around recording, and step outside, and really use a clear-minded way to make music.”

The results can be instantly appealing (the odd, slightly bluesy sweetness of “Beckoning Breeze” and the more ethereal “General Wizard”), pleasantly puzzling (“Simian Mother,” where Olivegren’s vocals swerve into almost atonal improvisations) or coolly pastoral (pretty much anything she sings in Swedish). The album was released Tuesday via the duo’s Near Unison imprint, with distribution through Dischord Records. Engineer Craig Bowen helped them record it, and Heba Kedry mastered it.

Any rush to make Time Was stemmed from the way they first connected — during a chance encounter in 2012 at a music festival in Sweden — and their desire to quickly capitalize on their shared energy. For that record, she made a brief visit to the U.S.

“We talk about heavy issues, and we have things going on in our lives that are tough, but music is where there’s no reason for any strain.” —Asa Osborne of Zomes

For Near Unison, however, they were able to have far more conversations about craft and purpose. Olivegren, who studied at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, doesn’t let her academic musical training dominate the process, Osborne says.

“In my approach, I’m definitely unschooled, I can’t read music — wish I could — but just going on feeling, I think, is where we connect,” Osborne says. “Certainly you can be so trained that maybe your feeling is constricted or something, but I think with Hanna, she has so much emotion and power, and joy with life, that I learn from her energy more than her background and training.”

Olivegren says she instantly recognized that Osborne was a “pure spirit” after first meeting him during the Perspectives Festival in 2012. She’d never heard Zomes before; he invited her to his performance.

“I had to work that night, but I got my friend to take my shift so that I could go, and I didn’t know what it was going to be at all,” she says. “And I came in and I sat down on the floor, and he played, and I was just like, ‘Wow.'”

Osborne says he’s had some similarly frictionless experiences making music in the past, but it’s generally “more scattered and loaded when you’re working with four people, and everyone’s trying to always to understand each other and appreciate where each other is coming from.”

Zomes, as a duo, is on “another level,” Osborne says.

“I don’t think you need strife and confrontation to make good work, necessarily. I mean, in my life now, I’d much rather it be pleasant — and still deep,” Osborne says. “We talk about heavy issues, and we have things going on in our lives that are tough, but music is where there’s no reason for any strain. If there were strain, we wouldn’t do it.”

“I was standing at [Penn] Station in Baltimore, and I was like, ‘OK, I’m just going to make a record with this man I’ve met two times, in a city where I’ve never been before.” —Hanna Olivegren of Zomes

Getting to this point took a leap of faith on Olivegren’s part. She looks back on the trip to the U.S. to record Time Was, and she remembers being a little disoriented.

“I was standing at [Penn] Station in Baltimore, and I was like, ‘OK, I’m just going to like, make a record with this man I’ve met two times, in a city where I’ve never been before,'” she says.

But the Charm City is now a second home not only because of her friendship with Osborne — “it feels like we must have known each other for a long time in our past lives,” she says — but also for the way she’s connected with the city.

“Stockholm is great for music, but I just think that I found persons here to collaborate with in a way that I haven’t really found there,” she says. “So it just makes sense to be closer to this … and also I went to so many schools in Sweden, and maybe felt like I got stuck in a box of what to be or not to be. It felt pretty good to get away from that.”

Baltimore seems “really refreshing” for Olivegren, Osborne says. “She came here for us to make music, but it’s grown. She just resonates here. You either like a place or you don’t, and she likes it here.”

Despite Olivegren’s status as a foreigner, listeners shouldn’t read too far into the cover image for Near Unison, say both members of the band. The photo of a person in an alien mask under a heavy cloak was just the result of some improvising, they say.

“For awhile, we were just like, ‘Are we really gonna have this as the cover?’ It’s pretty, like … it’s intense,” Olivegren says. “And then we just couldn’t go with any other idea … because we also couldn’t stop looking at it.”

Zomes plays Union Arts in D.C. July 11.

Photo: Thrill Jockey

The petition started today has a simple mission: Persuade Dischord Records to sign Foo Fighters so Foo Fighters breaks up.

Started by music writer Grayson Currin, the petition on change.org stems from Dave Grohl’s recent suggestion that a deal with the influential D.C. label is on his super-successful band’s bucket list.

“If the Foos could do a Dischord single, then we could break up. Done deal,” Grohl said in a video interview with NME.

“People should support this petition because Dave Grohl says that, should Dischord release a Foo Fighters single, Foo Fighters will break up,” the petition reads. “This is very important, as Grohl and his band might be the most insufferable band of bros on the planet.”

In an email to Bandwidth, Currin calls his petition “entirely a joke” and says he doesn’t wish the Foos any harm. Yet, he adds, “I find Grohl’s opinions about music to be prescriptive and limiting and kind of myopic, and I feel like he often treats his values like official positions that should be adopted by heads of state or something.”

Grohl directed Sonic Highways, an HBO series about national music scenes and studios that also captured the making of his band’s latest album.

As of this writing, Currin’s petition has 55 signatures with a goal of 100.

Grohl recently publicized a letter he wrote to Dischord co-owner Ian MacKaye when he was 14, asking MacKaye to help out his teenage band Mission Impossible. He told NME the ex-Minor Threat vocalist found the letter in his attic.

I’ve reached out to MacKaye for comment on this petition business. No word back yet.