“‘Mars and Me’ is about the tension we feel between Venus and Mars within ourselves,” says the Mount Pleasant resident. “When one’s self is truly illuminated, we see beauty and horror.”

The track certainly explores two vastly different musical ideas. “Mars and Me” opens on a lovely but anxious note, with minor-key arpeggios buttressing Anway’s soft vocals. The band doesn’t settle into a mood, though. Before long, drums and strings propel the song into another atmosphere.

“Mars and Me” continues Anway’s partnership with producers Tommy Sherrod and Mike Okusami. The three worked together on Brushes’ debut release, Whatever, Again. Since then, they have recorded over 20 songs together and grown into a live quintet that includes guitarist/keyboardists Matt Henderson and Nick DePrey.

“Mars and Me” appears on Grizzly Beach, a split EP with Boston band Today Junior. Unlike Brushes’ more nuanced approach, Today Junior is all about the fist-pumpers. Grizzly Beach features their song, “Lee’s Anthem,” a shout-along ode to believing in yourself.

Once again, the contrast in styles is deliberate.

“One of the things I love most about Today Junior is that they write songs to make you feel good,” says Anway. “Their music connects me to Boston, where I grew up, and to many of the surf themes that have become fundamental to how I write songs.”

Anway and Brushes met Today Junior over the summer and the two bands immediately struck up a friendship. Aside from working on Grizzly Beach together, the two bands co-wrote a song that will appear on a full-length Brushes album out next year.

In the meantime, Brushes and Today Junior plan to embark on a mini-tour of the Northeast U.S. and drop a vinyl release of Grizzly Beach in early 2017.

Brushes, Today Junior and Homeshake Monday play Nov. 28 at Songbyrd Music House & Record Cafe.

The Frederick band’s eponymous full-length album, out Friday on New Jersey’s Black Numbers label, is the result of four years of shows and self-released EPs. Their woodshedding tends to be purposeful and ongoing, agree drummer/singer Matt Henry and guitarist/singer Evan Braswell. It helps that they’ve known each other for most of their lives and developed the kind of brotherly bond that keeps the sensibility intact.

“We’re all pretty picky — because we’re all such music-history nerds — about what we want out of the sound of the record,” Braswell says.

The 10-song Lilac Daze crackles with life: Songs such as “Shark Bait,” “Glow In The Dark” and “So Confused” have the kind of immediacy associated with Superchunk, Jawbreaker, Velocity Girl and other acts that sprung from edgy punk scenes but had broader sonic ambitions.

Lilac Daze isn’t coy about its primary reference points — Green Day, for example, gets repeated shoutouts on the band’s bio page. Henry says that for him in particular, the ’90s thing was baked-in.

“My mom loved to call into radio contests. She always won all sorts of CDs and videos … and my dad’s a huge music fan as well,” Henry says. “Even though I was like, in third grade, my mom was like, ‘Hey, I won this Weezer CD’ or ‘I won this Smashing Pumpkins CD.’ I kind of had all that stuff embedded in my brain, even at that young age.”

The band’s third member, bassist/singer Patti Kotrady, wasn’t an old friend, but she was a catalyst: Henry and Braswell met her at shows around D.C. and Maryland, and Lilac Daze essentially formed around her in late 2012 as she learned to play bass and write songs.

“At first, it was a little hard to fit into their musical process since they’ve done it together for so long … but Evan and Matt were great about making sure I had equal input when we first started,” Kotrady says.

A lot of Lilac Daze is about relationships, but the storytelling tends to be oblique. Kotrady’s “Lonely Eyes,” for instance, has a sensuous edge (“Thigh to thigh, hand in hand, I passively listened to your plans”), but it’s a collection of scenes more than anything else.

“Ultimately, it’s about being in a tough situation and reaching out for others’ company when that isn’t what’s best for you,” says Kotrady. “So you end up being with people who don’t really care about you, or vice versa.”

“Wrought Iron Fence,” by Braswell, is about wandering around a church alone and drunk — “realizing I still don’t know what I want out of that aspect in my life,” he says, noting that he wasn’t raised with religion. And Henry, the group’s only married member, credits “Jack O’ Lanterns” to finding proper perspective on childhood memories.

“This sounds so cheesy, but when I started dating Nicole, who’s now my wife, it was like, ‘OK, this is actually the time of my life,” Henry says. “Like, right now is the best time.”

And for now, all three members say the band’s interpersonal dynamic is fruitful. If there’s any tension, Braswell says, it’s because he and Henry “kind of act like little kids most of the time.” It’s not unusual for Kotrady to get the last word.

“One time we were in the car on a really long drive, and my feet smelled so bad that she made me pull over to buy new shoes,” Henry says. “We didn’t really get in an argument. I was just like, ‘OK, my feet smell really bad.'”

Lilac Daze plays an album release show Oct. 14 at the East Street Arts Center in Frederick, Md. The band also opens for La Sera on Oct. 20 at Songbyrd in D.C.

That could be the motto of DZ Tapes, the D.C.-based record label Isaacoff started in 2011. At the time, he had decided that simply running a music blog — the now-defunct DAYVAN ZOMBEAR — wasn’t enough. He wanted to take it to the next level. And this Saturday the digital-and-tape imprint celebrates its fifth anniversary with a marathon show at local DIY venue Hole In The Sky.

Brett Isaacoff of DZ Tapes (photo: Julia Leiby)

How did DZ Tapes get here? Back in Isaacoff’s blogging days, he says, he kept receiving great submissions from indie artists — “so much so that I really want[ed] to find a way to share the work that was coming around my e-desk,” the D.C. resident says. “So I figured I might as well put out a mixtape.” He launched a successful Kickstarter campaign to put out a compilation. The label followed in its wake.

Now DZ Tapes has several cassettes under its belt, featuring both artists from here and elsewhere. It focuses on bands bringing new energy to D.C. and Baltimore’s underground rock scenes — label alumni include shoegazers Wildhoney and Big Hush, punks Hemlines and the fuzzy Nice Breeze, among others.

Sustaining any project for half a decade is no easy feat — perhaps doubly so considering the volatility of the music industry. But Isaacoff has figured out the formula: keep your expectations low and your planning short-term.

“It’s as hard as you want to make it, really,” Isaacoff says. “I’m just trying to have fun and enjoy myself and help people out.” By booking shows and working with interesting bands, he aims to give back to the scene that gave him — an avid showgoer himself — so much.

Hemlines “All Your Homes,” released on DZ Tapes

Keeping his day job as a business analyst at a solar startup has helped grease the gears at DZ Tapes. “If I could make money off of [the label] I would, but it’s not something that I want to really force,” Isaacoff says. “I feel like blending the lines between quote-unquote business and pleasure might get a little messy.”

A steady path is as good a marker of success as any, though there have been certain high points — like when Rolling Stone published a piece about Speedy Ortiz right before they were to play D.C. house venue The Dougout, a show he booked. “Filled to capacity” isn’t quite the correct phrase for it — the 70-capacity venue was overflowing. “It was an extreme fire hazard, looking back on it,” Isaacoff says.

DZ Tapes’ future remains both certain and up in the air. There’s this weekend’s anniversary show — “It’s gonna be a banger,” promises Isaacoff — and a few more releases slated for the rest of 2016. But for the future-future? Isaacoff isn’t interested in pressuring himself. DZ Tapes is going “wherever it wants to go, really,” Isaacoff says.

DZ Tapes celebrates its fifth anniversary July 9 at Hole in the Sky. 

“It was about the dissonance of knowing somebody’s online persona and knowing them in real life,” says Jesse Paller, the brains behind June Gloom. “When you see how developed and curated somebody’s online persona is, it sort of comes at the expense of what they’re really like.”

Paller wrote the track about two years ago, when this phenomenon was less commonplace than it is now.

“I don’t even think about this stuff pretty much anymore because I feel like that concern has totally blown out,” says Paller, 23. “Everybody has an online persona and it’s just part of life, I guess. But at the time it was kind of jarring for me.”

Coming of age in a time when people are more likely to meet on social media before they rendezvous in person inspired Paller, too.

“I think it has something to do with transitioning from high school to college,” the songwriter says, “and getting all the friends I’ve known for my whole life replaced with people who I just met and didn’t think were interesting but had crazy Facebook presences.”

“URL” — from June Gloom’s forthcoming album, Fake Problems — swells and dips, with enveloping guitars and Paller’s slightly bummed-out intonation. An L.A native, Paller felt drawn to the twang and reverb of surf music, but the musician puts his own moody spin on it. He calls his style “sad surf.” It’s about “being chill but also being sad,” he says with a laugh.

While this song in particular was inspired by the band Speedy Ortiz, he credits another gloomy songwriter for helping him find his style: the late Elliott Smith.

“It’s impossible to shake Elliott Smith out of my songwriting at this point,” Paller says. “I just gave so many years of my life away listening to [him].”

Fittingly, the band name is stolen from a weather phenomenon that is a total bummer — a sheet of drowsy fog that seems to hang around the L.A. region for weeks in late spring and early summer.

“In high school it always got me — we were so excited to finally be done with school and then there’s a few weeks of just fog,” Paller says. “Which doesn’t make any sense, because the rest of the year is sunny.”

The musician remembers being home in Southern California for summer breaks and feeling morose — from fresh heartbreak, weird weather, the works — and going for drives. Those drives were beautiful, encompassing both beaches and mountains. Paller says his music is made for similar excursions: “That’s the ideal listening situation, I think.”

While there isn’t exactly a comparable scenic drive here in the mid-Atlantic, Paller says his “sad surf” could have a transporting effect. “Hopefully the music can take you there,” he says.

June Gloom’s Fake Problems is out July 15 on Funeral Sounds. June Gloom plays June 24 at Kokomo and July 20 at Songbyrd.

Deerhoof‘s never-look-back aesthetic has become a calling card, and its unpredictability a point of pride. Time and again, the San Francisco band has surprised listeners and pushed them in new musical directions they might not immediately want to go, and yet it’s hard not to loyally follow along with each sonic jump. Still, when a group has churned through as many bizarro ideas as Deerhoof has over the course of a brilliant run of albums that date back to the mid-1990s, you have to wonder how it keeps coming back with something different.

To follow up 2014’s excellent La Isla Bonita, Deerhoof’s members ditched the comforts of a traditional studio, rented a sterile abandoned office in the New Mexico desert and, with nothing written beforehand, just played. Seven days later, Deerhoof reemerged with its 14th album, The Magic, an eclectic 15 songs inspired by the music each member — vocalist and bassist Satomi Matsuzaki, guitarists and multi-instrumentalists Ed Rodriguez and John Dieterich, and drummer Greg Saunier — grew up loving.

Deerhoof has always been masterful in concocting challenging albums that smash together genres, dissect structure and texture, and explore the depths of polyrhythms — and then abruptly blow it all up with acidic eruptions. In that regard, The Magic is no different. Bristling with electricity, these new songs are propelled by Saunier’s frenzied drumming and Matsuzaki’s funky bass lines, searing synth sequencers and finger-flying guitars that playfully switch things up when you least expect it. It adds up to a tense, visceral, unrelenting sound that doesn’t let listeners get comfortable for very long.

“The Devil And His Anarchic Surrealist Retinue” (which borrows its title from a descriptor in Alex Ross’ book The Rest Is Noise) is emblematic of Deerhoof’s turn-on-a-dime changes: It opens with slack-stringed strumming and Saunier’s ferocious snare-drum attack, a disjunct arpeggio pattern and a swoony slide guitar to accentuate Matsuzaki’s bright vocals. But then the beat drops, yielding to a jazz-infused R&B bridge that provides a smooth counterpoint to the harshness.

Elsewhere, Deerhoof cycles through sounds that deliver a little something for everyone — from infectious handclaps, rattling tambourines and messy surf-rock guitars (“Plastic Thrills”) to pulsing sequencers and thick power chords (“Learning To Apologize Effectively”) to bit-crunched, rubbery grooves (“Little Hollywood”). There’s the sneering thrash of “That Ain’t No Life To Me” and “Dispossessor,” which sound as if played from a cheaply dubbed cassette; and there’s the warped reimagining of “I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire” — a romantic classic popularized by early doo-wop group The Ink Spots, overhauled with dusty drum-machine beats and chiming pads.

More than just the sound of loud, off-kilter textures colliding, The Magic captures a love for pop melody that provides a perfect antidote to the dissonance, with songs that are as catchy as they are noisy. “Criminals Of The Dream” eschews the grit for dancey glitter, as Matsuzaki reassuringly coos, “Dream you can dream… I know you can dream / Things aren’t as bad as they seem” atop shimmering harmonies. In another highlight, “Life Is Suffering,” Deerhoof establishes a meaty backbone, punctuated by piercing attacks high on the guitar neck. But then the chorus shifts to a more soulful mood when Matsuzaki and Saunier duet, “Note my screams of joy, higher and higher and higher / Life is suffering, man.”

Deerhoof’s words on The Magic are as abstract as ever, yet they evocatively function more as another rhythmic element, ping-ponging delightfully off the tongue. That’s true of “Kafe Mania!,” a gnarly riff-centric shout-out to coffee drinks (“Cappuccino! Macchiato! Affogato! Cortado!”), or the ’80s arena-rock homage “Acceptance Speech,” which delivers a self-referential introduction (“Deerhoof here we are, Deerhoof here we come / We love to visit your towns…”) that could easily kick off every show from now on. Meanwhile, the syncopated jam “Model Behavior” digs into politics, as Matsuzaki and Saunier sing, “A model behavior, a candidate / I am tough and I don’t give up.”

As much as Deerhoof seeks new territory, the band rarely loses its own thread. No matter the genre trappings, Deerhoof’s rhythmic precision and off-the-rails improvisation, abrasiveness and melodicism are always dialed into its DNA and immediately identifiable. It’s what makes The Magic‘s most unanticipated moments all the more daring and exhilarating.

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

Oscars — a species of fish native to South America — can be aggressive, says the songwriter and guitarist in D.C. rock band Thaylobleu. Sea creatures wade into an oscar’s territory at their own risk. “It’s pretty straight-ahead,” says Nicholson, 47. “If an oscar’s hungry, it’s gonna bite you.”

Jellyfish, by contrast, are deceptive. “At first blush, [a jellyfish] is kinda soft and squishy,” Nicholson says. “But [if] you rub up against it, it’ll sting you.”

“Oscars & Jellyfish,” the debut album from D.C. rockers Thaylobleu

Nicholson says rippers like Thaylobleu’s “Locked” fall under the “oscar” category. Seemingly gentler songs, like “Amnesiah,” float along like jellyfish, sneakily dangerous. The tracks represent two poles on Thaylobleu’s debut album — called, naturally, Oscars & Jellyfish — out this week.

The record represents a turn in Nicholson’s musical career, which blossomed in the ’90s with D.C. hip-hop group Opus Akoben. The trio did well — it fetched a major-label deal in France and got love in Europe — but Opus split up, dropping its last record in 2002. Nicholson began to reevaluate himself creatively after that. He’d always loved rock music, songwriting and arranging. But he didn’t pursue them seriously until he made a key discovery: some of his hip-hop buddies were listening to rock, too.

“Back in 2010, we all found out that, ‘Hey, I didn’t know you was listening to this, I didn’t know you was into that,'” says Nicholson. He got together with hip-hop heads William “Bill” Vaughn and The Poem-Cees’ Darrell Perry and formed a rock band, rounded out by drummer Joe Hall. (Fifth member DJ Ayce International joined later on.) He called the group Thaylobleu, after Phthalocyanine Blue BN, a deep and calming shade of blue he fell in love with while attending the Corcoran School of Art.

Thaylobleu focuses on songwriting with an emphasis on lyricism — true to Nicholson’s hip-hop background. Storytelling plays a leading role, too. “Locked” tells the true tale of a nasty encounter Nicholson had with police in 2010. Another album highlight, “Too Much” describes Nicholson’s past dalliances with rowdy women. (One lyric: “When she told me that she liked it rough/Didn’t know she meant fisticuffs.”)

“I wouldn’t appreciate where I am now if it hadn’t had been for [the bad matches],” says Nicholson, who’s married these days. “So [‘Too Much’] is about acceptance, about love, and it’s also about the girl who stabbed me in the face with a spoon.” (A true story, he says. After that incident he resolved to never take a date to Ben & Jerry’s.)

The coda on Oscars & Jellyfish, “Welcome to Anacostia” references the gradually gentrifying D.C. neighborhood in which Nicholson grew up and where he still lives and works. “I call Anacostia a village, and I’m watching it get sacked,” he says. The track delivers a message to new arrivals: “Just [be] mindful that if you live next door to a person who’s lived there 30 years and they’ve been sitting on their porch and laughing with their friends for the last 30 years,” he says, “don’t f***ing call the police on them.”

Nicholson, who spends his days working at the Anacostia Arts Center and teaching martial arts, says he doesn’t like to squander his time behind the mic. He considers it a blessing. That’s what hard-driving cut “Rose in the Briars” — definitely an oscar, not a jellyfish — is about.

Some of his neighbors in Anacostia “don’t have the privilege to be able to be on the microphone and speak their truth,” Nicholson says. “So when I say [on “Rose in the Briars”] ‘I’m the village crier, I’ll make your ears ring’… it’s about how I’m in a position where I can say something and I don’t take it lightly. There was a time that I did — when I was gigging and traveling and hip-hopping and groupies and all that stuff. And I said to myself, ‘If I ever get back to this thing again,’ after Opus broke up, ‘I’m gonna try to use it.'”

Thaylobleu plays an album release show June 16 at Velvet Lounge.

The counter-intuitive part of reaching emotional maturity is learning when to suppress certain emotions. They’re often the things we believe might make us truly happy, but instead, we tamp them down to avoid distorting normality; we trade thrills for consistency. Mitski Miyawaki’s fourth album, Puberty 2, measures that longing and the toll it takes. As a lifelong outsider whose father’s job meant she lived in 13 different countries as a kid, the 25-year-old excels at observing distance and understanding that sometimes assimilation is easier than assertion. “One morning this sadness will fossilize and I will forget how to cry,” she sings in “Fireworks,” a slow-burning account of internalizing pain. “I will go jogging routinely, calmly, and rhythmically run / And when I find that a knife’s sticking out of my side, I’ll pull it out without questioning why.”

That might make Puberty 2 sound meek. It is anything but. Mitski and her sole collaborator and producer, Patrick Hyland, trade the slightly rustic quality of 2014’s Bury Me At Makeout Creek for grungy sharpness and spacey ambience, and boast an array of neat production touches: the way her voice can burble and hiss like a boiling kettle, or how her breaths sound like whip-cracks and the guitars rage so loudly that the feedback seems to contain church bells. From stubborn punk to all-out rage to medicated ballads, the variety of modes here lives up to one of her recent tweets: “sometimes I want to be gross + pull my guts out of my mouth while screaming. other times I want to be clean, with no organs or pores.” Often she switches between both within the space of a single song. These 11 tracks creep up on you, as her coiled melodies suddenly explode into cavernous freak-outs or build to a crescendo of unbearable catharsis.

Online, Mitski is the patron saint of #sadgirls, the subculture that uses ironic self-deprecation as a way of dealing with depression and vulnerability. “life w mental illness=50%act normal act normal b cool 15%if I jus went full crazy will they finally get it+let me b? 35%I’m in a hole I dug,” she tweeted last September, earning 152 retweets, 392 favorites, and a further 22,952 notes when a screenshot was reblogged on tumblr. Sadgirls have a strong sense of their own cosmic insignificance and understate their problems accordingly. Mitski’s “My Body’s Made Of Crushed Little Stars” could be their anthem. It’s a frenzied blast that recalls Neutral Milk Hotel‘s “Holland, 1945,” her acoustic guitar rattling like a rusty chainsaw as she howls about the disparity of existence: “I wanna see the whole world / I don’t know how I’m gonna pay rent.” And, “I work better under a deadline / I pick an age when I’m gonna disappear.”

But understatement generally isn’t Mitski’s style. She evokes quotidian disappointment in brutal terms, yet avoids lapsing into melodrama. “Your Best American Girl” finds the half-Japanese songwriter trying to be the apple pie of an all-American boy’s eye, but ending the relationship because of the difference in their prospects and his mother’s distaste for her heritage. The verse’s cool acoustic hymnal crests to a staticky thrash, and in between blasts, the noise briefly subsides to expose her confession: “You’re the one, you’re all I ever wanted / I think I’ll regret this.” She’s stuck with lovers who won’t acknowledge her in public — in the goth Julee Cruise girl-group sounds of “Once More To See You” and the 93-second blast “A Loving Feeling,” which evokes a rollicking Mitch Easter production — or poorly timed relationships that undo any self-worth she’s accrued. “I always want you when I’m finally fine,” she laments in the curdled dream-pop song “I Bet On Losing Dogs.” There’s cool precision to the way she countenances sadness that doesn’t wallow or expect pity, but echoes the hollow feeling of being denied again and again.

Tired of being held hostage by desire, Mitski confronts it head-on. In “Happy,” she personifies joy as a cad who comes over, gets his kicks and then slips out when she’s cleaning up in the bathroom. He might as well have taken her heart, she says, since there’s no longer any use for it — yet the song maintains a strange stoicism, a steely saxophone fanfare rejecting the twin vacillations of ecstasy and agony. “I’m not happy or sad / Just up or down / And always bad,” she sings in the overcast ballad “Thursday Girl.” She opts out of the rigged game altogether in “A Burning Hill,” a glowing ember of acoustic fingerpicking and a subtle choral bed, as she sings, “I’m tired of wanting more / I think I’m finally worn / For you have a way of promising things, and I’ve been a forest fire.” She decides to love “the littler things.” It sounds like giving up, but she’s taking control, robbing her emotions of the power to capsize her wellbeing. Puberty 2 is a strike against the happy/sad poles that govern our lives from an artist who has much more complex and captivating things to offer.

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

Lipple defines his role in Aloha as “musician, producer and buddy of Tony,” or Tony Cavallario, the band’s founder, frontman and lyricist. The “producer” part is probably the easiest to define — Lipple is responsible for shaping the finished sonic product. The rest? He recalls trying to explain it recently to one of his North Springfield, Virginia, neighbors.

“He asked me what I played on the record, and I was like, ‘I don’t know. Sometimes I play nothing, and sometimes I play marimba, and … ‘” Lipple says, trailing off. “I should probably have a better canned answer for that, but I don’t, because it’s true — whenever we make records, my role is ‘guy who makes the record,’ and when I’m mixing it, sometimes it doesn’t need more instruments.”

He says, however, that he’s got carte blanche to record bass, keyboard, percussion and other parts as necessary.

“If something’s not right, I’ll fix it — I don’t care what it is, except for lead vocals. I wouldn’t try to replace vocals, that would just be a mess,” he says.

The results on Little Windows Cut Right Through will be familiar to anyone who has paid attention to Aloha’s career arc: Exquisite but forceful rhythms, polished arrangements and coolly intelligent songwriting dominate the mix, while the band’s original post-punk energy lurks underneath. Synthesizers are definitely more prominent than usual, though. Two Spotify playlists recently posted by Cavallario feature “deep ’80s” acts such as Prefab Sprout and the Blue Nile.

Lipple says Cavallario’s demos for the album took awhile for him to absorb.

“I don’t like the sound of … cheesy ’80s synths. There’s a lot of music with those instruments but, you know, is it good? If you look through my record collection, I just don’t have a lot of ’80s music … I’d never heard of Prefab Sprout and The Blue Nile … until well after we were working on [the record] and Tony played some of it for me. When I heard the Prefab Sprout stuff, it blew my mind — I thought it was amazing.”

One signature of Aloha’s early sound — the use of melodic, mallet-oriented instruments such as marimba and vibraphone — has largely receded. It’s because the original vibraphonist, Eric Holtnow, was a “serious player,” Lipple says, and he doesn’t have the chops to duplicate that kind of playing. Lipple replaced Holtnow in the band in the early 2000s after meeting Cavallario through a mutual friend in Pennsylvania. He moved to D.C. soon afterward, linking up with studio whizzes Chad Clark of the band Beauty Pill and Don Zientara of the famed Inner Ear Studios in Arlington. (Lipple plays with Zientara in The Desperados, a band featuring current and former National Gallery of Art employees.)

The appeal of staying with Aloha, Lipple says, lies in working with drummer Cale Parks, bassist Matthew Gengler and Cavallario, who is a “very nonlinear thinker, but he knows when it’s right.” Parks is one of the rare drummers who is capable of “record-worthy” takes almost instantly after sitting down at the kit, and Gengler plays bass with an understated feel that can be tough to duplicate, Lipple says.

And beyond those relationships, Lipple says it’s tough for him to shake pride of ownership over the band’s sound. A few years ago Aloha considered lightening his load as a studio hand, but didn’t follow through.

“As soon as it got to the point of actually seriously considering giving it up, I just got like a kid with a toy,” he says. “I just wanted it back. Like, ‘This is mine.’ So that’s the last time we considered that.”

As Aloha evolves, and as Lipple’s résumé as a technician expands, he says one thing will remain constant.

“Some people have a way of having the drums just be there without kicking you in the gut, and I don’t know if I could do that,” Lipple says. “I always have to make the drums kick you in the gut, punch you in the face — make it physical.”

At least that’s how it appears in the video for “Wouldn’t You Like To Know,” a new song by his pop-kissed indie-rock band, Fellow Creatures. The visual portrays the singer/keyboardist wandering around a party that’s morphed into a nightmare. Guests appear in carnival outfits and animal masks. They shout, wrestle or just stare blankly. McCormally tries to stick to the sidelines, but everywhere he goes, he’s confronted with video screens of himself.

The whole thing looks like a surrealist art film. But McCormally insists it’s based on a true experience the D.C. band had at a tour stop in Cincinnati.

“After a show, we headed to the house belonging to the booker,” McCormally says. “His housemates were hanging out, drinking a lot and listening to The Toadies really loud. And as the evening progressed, it became clear that no one had any intention of going to sleep.”

The residents grew wilder as the night went on, while the exhausted band members pleaded for a chance to rest. (Baltimore band Ed Schrader’s Music Beat dubbed this common tour experience “party jail.”) McCormally remembers trying to sleep on the porch, to no avail.

“They followed us out and proceeded to bust up an old TV set in the yard with a baseball bat,” the vocalist says.

Like its video, “Wouldn’t You Like To Know” also addresses the unpleasant events, albeit in a more introspective way.

“The experience made me think a lot about anger,” says McCormally, the song’s primary writer. “Is it the kind of thing that you need to release via a catharsis? Or is it the kind of thing that the more you go there, the quicker your trigger is?”

McCormally brought his ideas to his bandmates, singer/guitarist Will McKindley-Ward, bassist/guitarist Rishi Chakrabarty and drummer David Greer. The four worked out the final arrangement with producer Louis Weeks and engineer Chris Freeland as part of the sessions for the group’s new self-titled album, released last week.

The band filmed the video with cinematographer Ellie Walton at McCormally’s home in Mt. Rainier, Maryland. To top off the outrageous atmosphere, they asked friends to don any costumes they could find.

Unlike the original night, though, the whole thing was over in an hour — and nobody’s rest was disturbed.

“My 4-month old daughter slept through the entire thing,” McCormally says.

Fellow Creatures play an album-release show April 15 at Tropicalia and May 21 at DC9 in D.C.

But Flasher isn’t trying to sound retro. In fact, the group hasn’t settled on a particular vibe yet, says bassist and co-vocalist Danny Saperstein.

Released April 8, Flasher’s debut EP “is exciting because it does feel a little all over the place, a little scattered,” says Saperstein (of Bless and Trouble). “That’s probably a product of us still figuring out our sound.”

This chaos is only sonic. Turns out, Flasher is a kind of fated trio.

“We’ve been best friends for a really long time,” says guitarist Taylor Mulitz (of Priests and Young Trynas). “We all work together, [drummer] Emma [Baker] and I live together.” Plus, “Danny’s at the house a lot,” Baker says.

That closeness translated well to Flasher. “Luckily, all of us have a really easy time doing music with each other, which I think is really kind of rare,” says Mulitz. “There’s just something about doing it naturally and never feeling stressful trying to write a song.”

Why another band, though?

“The two bands that I play in do such different stuff that it fulfills completely different things for me — even though I’m playing the same instrument… it feels completely different,” says Baker, who also plays in Big Hush. “It’s really helped me progress. If I was missing one of them, I wouldn’t be the same drummer that I am.”

While the three have basically been Flasher since the first time Saperstein joined Mulitz and Baker onstage — in August 2015 — the band is an infant at best. That’s made clear by something that, in 2016, seems uncommon.

“Up until a week ago,” Mulitz says, “we had no Internet presence whatsoever.”

Flasher plays April 16 at Bathtub Republic and June 3 at Black Cat. The band’s debut EP is out now on Sister Polygon Records.