To capture the songs from his latest album, Emotional Mugger, Segall was joined by The Muggers, a who’s-who of today’s psych and garage rockers, including Kyle Thomas of King Tuff, Mikal Cronin, Wand’s Cory Hanson and Evan Burrows, and Emmet Kelly of The Cairo Gang. Raw and raucous, the set spilled over with zany passion, as Segall dribbled, drooled, squealed, bawled and threw lyrical tantrums over blistering guitars, squelching keys and pummeling rhythms. Big baby, bad baby, weird baby — if Ty Segall is the first baby born at KEXP’s new studio, we can only marvel at the generations to come.

SET LIST

• “Emotional Mugger/Leopard Priestess”

Watch Ty Segall’s full performance on KEXP’s YouTube channel.

Copyright 2016 KEXP-FM. To see more, visit KEXP-FM.

Barreling on after a non-stop flurry of activity over the past eight years, Ty Segall is dropping his 10th solo album in the dead of winter, its cover depicting a Xeroxed baby head as it peers out of the fold amid a field of toner-black gradients. Staring into that disquieting image is adequate preparation for Emotional Mugger, which feels as fractured and delirious as anything he’s recorded.

Segall’s last solo album, Manipulator, showcased both polish and conceptual harmony that seemed inevitable, given the directions the garage-rock wunderkind was heading. But it would appear now that Segall wants to run screaming in the opposite direction, crawl directly into listener’s minds and do some rewiring. The pop hooks, fuzz guitar and Anglicized vocals fans expect are all here, but Segall seems indifferent to his own playbook, throwing in corkscrews of weirdness like elbows to the head whenever he feels like it.

“Squealer” changes fidelity midstream, while synthesized counter-melodies draw tracers around the lopsided title track, all to a mid-tempo thump that corrals the brightness of Segall’s earlier works into a medicated snarl. Recalling the heavier work of his band Fuzz, “Diversion” pairs its catchiness with force engineered to blow your hair back; Segall turns an unusually sweet corner with the aptly titled “Candy Sam,” even employing a small children’s choir to sing the chorus. If you’ve ever wondered how Segall might channel the early, risk-taking triumphs of Beck, much of the evidence is right here.

Throughout this reinvention, many signposts of compatriots’ work surface. The whole of Emotional Mugger seems closer to the paisley abandon of White Fence — and the bizarre, druggy pulse of Segall’s proteges in WAND — than even his own fractured earlier works might indicate. But Emotional Mugger exists more as a head trip than any stab at continuity and making friends. It’s a wild, twisted ride into and out of Segall’s psyche — the sound of a restless mind attempting to turn itself inside out.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

“I love playing with my friends and stuff, but after a while it just felt like I didn’t know how to collaborate with other people and still maintain my own voice,” says Spector, 28.

So the Bethesda resident decided it was time to pursue her own thing. She borrowed a name from a Captain Beefheart song and started up Hothead, her journey into slightly terrifying solo territory.

“Hothead is kind of like my biggest fear,” says Spector, who plays guitar, drums and bass. “I can’t hide behind other people, I can’t hide behind the drums or whatever. I have to sing, I have to do everything. It’s been this tremendous boost to my confidence.”

On Hothead’s rangy debut — out soon on D.C. label Sister Polygon — Spector bounces around from hazy garage to borderline country, focusing on somewhat traditional songcraft, in contrast to her earlier, noisier bands.

“I’m really interested in figuring out how to write songs from a really traditional point of view — folk, blues,” Spector says. “I was just like, ‘I want to sit down with an acoustic guitar and play an old-fashioned song.’”

Lyricism doesn’t get short shrift, either, as Spector explores emotional territory she skirted around in previous groups — a direct product of her transformative time in therapy.

“The sound itself I think I’m still figuring out, but ultimately it’s supposed to be a songwriting project… where I really think about the [lyrics] and try to express feelings that I feel or that people I know feel,” the musician says.

The multi-instrumentalist brings her family into the project, too, using cover art inspired by her grandfather — who loved to doodle — and recordings of her grandmothers speaking and playing music. She says the focus on family symbolizes a ruling concept in people’s lives: love.

“Honestly, every single song’s about love,” Spector says. “But a universal kind of love, not some sort of romantic or possessive kind of love.”

Spector admits that she still finds it difficult to take herself seriously in her new solo format. But Hothead’s debut has prompted her to think optimistically.

“I was like, ‘OK, I did that in three months,’” Spector says. “Think what I could do in a year.”

Hothead plays Jan. 8 at CD Cellar Arlington.

The original version of this post said Hothead’s debut arrives Jan. 15. It does not have an official release date yet. The post has been corrected.

“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.

While he’s a bowler at heart, Krol performs as a cop onstage, arresting concert-goers with fire-fringed police uniforms, flashing sirens and prison props. Before his recent show in Seattle, Mike Krol and his band visited the KEXP studio for a fun and captivating set. Watch him perform “Left Out” here.

SET LIST

• “Left Out”

Watch Mike Krol’s full performance on KEXP’s YouTube channel.

Copyright 2015 KEXP-FM. To see more, visit http://www.kexp.org/.

Once again, Segall and his cohorts are ushered out of the garage; this is music meant to be played at a volume walls can’t contain. Fuzz’s namesake is no joke, either — this is proto-metal, anvil-head blues-rock, thick like cement about to harden. II vacillates between blunt-force heaviness and a slightly trippier variant, but the pall of doom is cast all over it, making it Segall’s darkest record in a good long time. He’s got an athletic presence on the drums, with a pingy snare sound that captures how hard he hits, but his faux-Brit glam vocals can’t mask the darkness as he brings to mind a young Ozzy Osbourne. “Bringer Of Light” and “Pipe” sound like they should be reverberating across a Hammer horror castle in the chill of late November, as Moothart and Ubovich flex their instrumental muscle, sounding for all the world like a diesel freighter downshifting.

Still, Fuzz recognizes the powers of restraint. Follow the 14-minute title track to its core, and instead of meandering off into drum solos and other diversions, the three simply opt to get low. The riffs are still there, of course, but this time they’re engineered to pull you into the shadows.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

“All Kindsa Girls,” the catchy opener on The Real Kids’ 1977 debut, was an anthem in Boston’s budding punk-rock scene. The Real Kids were formed by John Felice, who had played in The Modern Lovers early on, and this song later became the name of a documentary about The Real Kids’ evolution.

Ex Hex has covered “All Kindsa Girls” live before and their version also showed up on Merge Records’ limited-edition Or Thousands of Prizes collection, but this is the first it’s been released digitally, according to NME.

Stream this hunk of rock below (and check out Bandwidth’s studio session with Ex Hex if you missed it):

Through it all, he’s remained remarkably open about his state of being, grafting his emotions onto a restless runaround of high-energy pop-punk and stoner fuzz. His songs roughly represent the equivalent of dumping a month’s worth of antidepressants and a roll of Mentos into a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke and letting it rip. V is loaded with cheerful songs about woes and impediments, afflictions and self-doubt, with multiple references to headaches (physical and otherwise). Along the way, our under-30 protagonist asks himself, “Have I lived too long?” and frets that “I’m getting worse” in “Heavy Metal Detox.” (On a brighter note, in “Pony,” he sings hopefully about how, “It gets better / It better.”) Williams’ compatriot in all this, bassist Stephen Pope, is a first-person witness to these fears, having played for a few years with the late Jay Reatard before joining Wavves.

Williams is careful to leave his mark without smudging the classics: “Flamezesz” lifts a swirly keyboard lead from Trompe Le Monde-era Pixies and plunges it into his wild-eyed darkness (“It’s suicide, uh huh, the way you walk around”), while “Cry Baby” cribs an opening riff as a speeded-up, smoothed-out nod to Pavement‘s “Box Elder.” But Williams’ rambunctious, brutally honest first-person narratives are all his own, the product of his talent and an innate understanding of what it’s like to wander into a world of temptation, knowing that it’s not much safer on the couch.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The D.C. garage-rock trio deals directly with that often suffocating pressure on “Gun To My Head” (listen below), the opening track on its new EP Gun, Medicine, Prayer.

“I remember being in my early 20s,” says singer and guitarist Kenny Pirog, “and I know I can’t be the only one who felt like I was under tremendous pressure. Pressure to get a career going, to find a new home. Kind of like the system was holding a gun to my head.”

Now 28, Pirog says he wrote the song “because I wanted to smack that gun out of the system’s hand and not succumb to the pressure, and find my own way to play with the system.”

While the track is more about taking control of one’s life than D.C. life in particular, the nation’s capital still sounds etched into the song. Pirog, an Adams Morgan resident, says he took some of his cues from punk bands he saw at an iconic local rock club.

“I was hanging around Black Cat all the time, seeing a lot bands — a lot of which were punk-rock bands — and just getting that ingrained into my musical vocabulary,” Pirog says. “Musically, ‘Gun To My Head’ is a very D.C. song.”

Drawing from the energy of D.C.’s punk-rock scene as well as his own background in blues and jazz — Pirog’s older brother Anthony is an established experimental jazz composer in town — the guitarist says that “this attitude and energy that they played all these songs with contributes as much, if not more, to the song’s identity than just the chords, the melody and the lyrics.”

That attitude is the reason “Gun To My Head” is the leading track on the EP. “It just hits you right away,” Pirog says. “There’s no intro or anything, it’s just immediately full-throttle.”

The combination of lyrics and punk lineage may make the song instantly relatable for anyone who has spent much time in the District, which is exactly what Pirog wants.

“When I write a song,” Pirog says, “I want it to be relatable for an audience, so that people can personally identify with each one.”

Plus the band—which plays Comet Ping Pong Saturday night—makes the kind of snotty protopunk that D.C. listeners already have a soft spot for. (The Ar-Kaics call their sound “troglodyte teenbeat ’60s-style punk.”)

The band’s forthcoming self-titled LP follows a string of fuzzy releases on a few different labels, including Windian. But this one sounds a little less grimy than those earlier slabs. Blame that on some kind of spooky magic, maybe: Engineer Jeff Kane recorded the record at what bassist Timmy (Tim Abbondelo) calls a “mystical rock ‘n’ roll retreat” in Northern Virginia.

Not that the album is any less punk for it. “[I] learned these songs the week before we recorded the LP,” Abbondelo writes in an email.

The album’s catchy, angsty first single (stream it at the top of this page) is “No No No,” written—like most of the band’s songs—by frontman Kevin Longendyke (also of The Shirks). It comes across as kiss-off from a loner who’s ready to extend his middle finger to the world. Longendyke wasn’t available to chat when I reached the band via email today, so here’s how Abbondelo describes the tune: “I think it’s about alienation or something. Maybe overcoming everyday adversity? You’d have to ask Kevin.”

Abbondelo says to also expect a promotional video for the single, made in cooperation with Richard and Jonathan Howard of Cigarette, the D.C. slocore band that sometimes includes The Ar-Kaics’ Johnny Ward.

So what can we expect from the rest of the album? “Raging punkers and eerie and achy, really beautiful ballads,” says Abbondelo—with one disclosure: “I wasn’t around for any of the writing process,” he clarifies. “That said, I think it’s the greatest.”

The Ar-Kaics’ LP is available for preorder at Windian Records. The band plays Comet Ping Pong Saturday, June 14 with White Mystery, Joy Classic, and DJ Baby Alcatraz.