“The best way to understand Brutalism is to view it as a nonhierarchical music collective with authoritarian tendencies,” they decreed. “All of our ideas belong to each other, and all carry the full force of sonic law.”

The D.C.-based electronic act consists of Gavin Holland, Zach Carter and Boston resident Benjamin Bruno. All musical ideas are credited as collaborative — but the dynamic has a decidedly Teutonic edge.

“Each member has sonic veto power,” they declare, “but given the political cost, it’s rarely invoked.”

The harsh tone is certainly in line with Brutalism’s first singles, “Friday Night (Home Invasion)” and “New Empire.” The songs were fist-pumping anthems celebrating the violent and the despotic. They both appeared on No Rave, the group’s cassette EP released in November.

“Amulets,” on the other hand, is a mood piece with largely hushed vocals. The song progresses like a deep breath. Soft piano notes punctuate a bed of krautrock-style synths, while singer Bruno sighs wistfully about the inevitable end of all things.

“We wanted to expand our horizons to encompass death itself,” the group explains. “If you can capture death in song, you can defeat it.”

The cover art extends this new direction. While Brutalism have previously identified themselves with photos of solid, large-scale structures, “Amulets” is presented with a close-up view of a ruined Ancient Egyptian tomb.

“Even monoliths crumble in time,” they state. “The tomb is shattered. It would be scarcely recognizable to its architects. Yet, in an important way, it endured.”

“Amulets” is the first of several singles Brutalism is releasing in 2016, and they plan to perform live again this fall.

“Friday night!” the group bellows on the track. Their vocals sound overwrought; their synths sparkly. But this is no anthem for weekend warriors.

“It was a Friday night home invasion,” goes one verse. “Male, 6’2″ and Caucasian. Cause of death: strangulation.”

D.C.’s only murder tale to be paired with dance pop (in recent memory, anyway), “Friday Night” is giddily gruesome — and now it has an equally bizarre video, premiered on Bandwidth today.

Like the group’s earlier video for “New Empire,” the “Friday Night” visual is basically a potpourri of vintage footage, only this time, most of it looks pulled from the ’80s and ’90s. If the video has a main character, it’s a nuclear-green Pontiac Stinger — described by one YouTube user as “the most ridiculous concept/future car ever” — that cruises the beach dispensing sexy fun.

There’s not really a narrative here, though. Brutalism member Gavin Holland says he and bandmates Ben Bruno and Zach Carter just scoured the Internet for “the weirdest vintage yet action-oriented footage” they could get.

“Some of it is thematically relevant, but we also have imagery we just enjoy,” Holland writes, “like dudes surfing and ’90s robot CGI dinosaurs.”

Carter points out that while the video might seem random, it actually stems from Brutalism’s core philosophy.

“Brutalism has always believed that if you’re going to be murdered in your own home, you might as well go windsurfing first,” Carter writes. “We consider this a bedrock aesthetic principle.”

The first song from new D.C. electronic trio Brutalism was a tough act to follow: “Friday Night (Home Invasion)” told a story about a gruesome murder, backed by a soundtrack of Italo-kissed synth-pop. But its newest song, “New Empire,” could be even more demented: It imagines a ruthless imperial order that mandates public death matches, self-immolation and lots of sex, and ties it all up with Soviet electro.

The song started with an idea from Brutalism member Zach Carter, according to his bandmate Gavin Holland. “Then we had to figure out a sonic direction to go in,” Holland writes in an email. “All came together when we threw in a new synth we got that’s American-made, but retrofitted with Soviet electronics.”

Lyrically, this one is as twisted as “Friday Night (Home Invasion),” which seems to be the theme Brutalism is going for. “As far as the lyrics go, the language of imperialism has always been seductive and absurd all at once, and this song definitely reflects that,” Holland writes.

The video had to match the tone, says Holland. So Brutalism borrowed from vintage film, combining images of steely industry, Western urbanization and hoards of Greco-Roman-era slaves.

“We are talking about empires, so we wanted it to come off as massive,” Holland writes. “CGI didn’t cut it for us, so we chose to do something with thousands of actual human extras.”

For “Friday Night (Home Invasion),” members Gavin Holland, Zach Carter and Ben Bruno took their cues from true-crime TV and country-music storytelling. The song’s narrative is simple enough: “It’s about having your home broken into and getting murdered,” Carter says.

Why so macabre, fellows? “I used to watch The First 48 a lot — I’ve probably seen 50 episodes of it,” says Holland, a longtime local DJ and producer. “There’s a lot of botched home invasions on that show: bad circumstances, someone breaking in at the wrong time, ending up in murder.”

“Friday Night” tells the story of such a thwarted robbery attempt — except over an insanely hyper soundtrack. Dancing to it may seem slightly perverse, but dissonance was more or less the point.

“I liked the idea of doing music that is both accessible and confrontational — something that makes you feel good but a little uncomfortable at the same time,” Carter says. “I felt like having such a melodic song with such stark lyrical content would help accomplish that goal.”

Holland, Carter and Bruno (who splits his time between Boston and D.C.) are old friends who played around with the idea of making music together for a while, but they started taking it seriously about six months ago. Holland may be best known for his Nouveau Riche dance parties, and Carter is a journalist by day and a former member of the band Drunk Tigers. In Brutalism, their roles are fluid; all three members trade off behind the mic.

While “Friday Night (Home Invasion)” is something of a floor filler — it’s tagged “no rave” on the band’s Soundcloud page — that doesn’t necessarily mean that future Brutalism songs will sound like it. Carter cites eclectic indie titans Beck and The Magnetic Fields as influences. Brutalism would like to be just as heterogeneous while maintaining a confrontational edge.

“You’ll see when those [later songs] come out, there’s a common theme that the songs are not so much concerned with common sonic textures or instruments, but rather with ideas and attitudes,” Carter says.

The trio’s ideas already seem front and center — and that extends to its choice of name. Brutalism, of course, is an architectural movement marked by aggressive geometric structures as unmistakable as they are divisive. Not surprisingly, Carter and Co., are pretty into it. But the name “Brutalism” is more a homage to contention rather than the architectural style itself.

As Carter says, “We liked the idea of being at the center of some sort of aesthetic controversy before we even got out of the gate.”

Chris Burns and Gavin Holland, formerly known as Party Bros.

Released two years ago, Party Bros.’ single “Malcolm X Park” told a mostly invented but plausible story about the illicit pleasures found after sundown in the hills and dark stairways of D.C.’s famous urban park. The 12-inch was the first on Mysteries of the Mind, a label founded by D.C. DJs and producers Gavin Holland and Chris Burns. Now, the duo is back with a new EP that features a bouncy and considerably less tongue-in-cheek track, “Aracari,” released under the name M.O.T.M.

It might feel too early in the year for exotic bird calls, but “Aracari” brings them in bulk. The glossy, tropical tune stirs up a balmy atmosphere that feels like, well, Malcolm X Park circa August—damp, a little heavy-lidded, and worthy of copious wicking material. Airy vocals—courtesy of a singer simply named Jane—top off the rainforest vibe.

“It’s been a long pause since the first release, but we have plans for more frequent releases for this year,” writes Holland in an email, adding that the pair recently fetched a vinyl and digital distributor that should give them more visibility.

“While we’re still producing everything electronically, the studio we work in has been completely revamped in the last year and we’re using more hardware than before to create sounds and ambiance,” Holland writes. “Everything is also being processed and mixed through a 30-channel analog summing console, which definitely has helped warm up our sounds and given a lift to the stereophonic width of our music.”

The record’s three-part flip side offers a different energy—which was intentional, Holland says. “For the B-side, we wanted to showcase something completely contrasting…to the A-side, hence the slower, heavier and darker tunes.” “Partial Victory” toys with dancehall influences; the slow-footed and spaced-out “Sloppy Seconds” sounds like Quaaludes. “Soft Focus,” meanwhile, seems to borrow its ideas from “Miami Vice”—it’s not quite tropical, but steeped in urban fantasy. This is music for dark nights and white blazers.

“Aracari” is available on vinyl now and digitally in June.