Under an epidermis of skinny-boy post-hardcore, Frodus’ last record is built on hauntingly sweet guitar riffs and rhythmic nuance, a potent distillation of youth, sex and sadness. It arrived in 2001, two years after the Northern Virginia band had already split up. But Weapons deepened Frodus’ distinguishable mark on the pages of D.C. music history. Now considered the band’s best album, it reappeared Nov. 23, reissued by Virginia’s Lovitt Records (stream the album below).

Frodus was formed in 1993 by guitarist and vocalist Shelby Cinca and drummer Jason Hamacher, teenagers fueled by art and angst in equal measure. They released their first LP in 1994, a blast of frustrated post-hardcore called Molotov Cocktail Party. The band followed up with three more screaming albums before it disbanded and discharged Weapons, its most polished work by far.

Yet Hamacher describes Weapons as the score to the worst year of Frodus’ lives. At the time, Hamacher’s then-girlfriend had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Bassist Nathan Burke’s relationship was falling apart. Cinca’s father had recently suffered a stroke.

Now with families and lives outside of music, Frodus’ members still consider the album a profound emotional milestone.

“There are markers in one’s life, especially one well-lived. I’ve been fortunate to have many,” says Burke, who now lives in Seattle. “This record is one of those markers. It helps give me perspective. I’m generally not a very nostalgic person, but I admit that Weapons has that effect on me.”

Hamacher, a loquacious musician currently working on a project to preserve lost Syrian chants, says Weapons frames a chapter in his life he can’t necessarily summarize in words.

“Emotionally, it represents the worst time,” says Hamacher, who still lives in D.C. “But how do I explain to my kids who I was? How do I tell them the story of my life before mom? This album is the soundtrack to that story.”

In particular, album cut “6/99” (meaning June 1999) bears witness to a month of catastrophic change for the band. “We could disappear!” Cinca shouts — a possibility that must have felt real at the time. But while personal tragedy played a role in Frodus’ undoing, another factor can’t be ignored: the D.C. music community, which Burke describes as limiting.

“For all of its benefits, the legacy of the punk-rock scene [in D.C.] became a constraint on creativity and drive, in my opinion,” Burke says. “If we wanted to really push it to that next level we would have had to have done it somewhere else.”

Frodus’ final year also coincided with the advent of digital music, with file-sharing service Napster starting up in 1999. Three years later, social-media site MySpace would help upend the way fans listened to music. But Frodus’ most devoted followers didn’t forget the group — in fact, the band says people inquired about a vinyl version for several years, as all of Frodus’ earlier albums saw reissues.

“With this record and all of the stories and memories that have come along with it, it’s been really cool to see what and how people remember,” says Hamacher.

Yet there’s a sense that when Frodus disbanded, it left things unsaid — or perhaps withheld conversations that should stay between bandmates.

Some of those secret transmissions see the light of day on the Weapons reissue. While Cinca rooted through old Frodus photos and tour schedules, arranging graphics and artwork for the reissue, he stumbled upon an early cassette tape and a post-breakup letter Burke had mailed to him.

The cassette includes a recording of Burke covering a Frodus song before he joined the band. Frodus decided to release it on a bonus 7-inch that accompanies the album’s vinyl reissue. Cinca — still a prolific musician, now living between Sweden and L.A. — calls it “a chance for people to see what happened behind the scenes, to give a bit of closure.”

As for the letter? That’s included, too. It’s tender and young, honest and difficult — the stuff of Frodus’ best music. But it’s all history, Cinca says, like the Frodus he cofounded as a teenager.

“You’re just young and [your band is] really important to you. It’s your world and you put so much into it. It’s still important, but it feels like a past life or something,” Cinca says. “I’m still that person, but I’m not that person.”

Frodus’ And We Washed Our Weapons In the Sea is available through Dischord Records and Bandcamp. Middle photo by Ove Wiksten, 1998. The original version of this post inaccurately said that Shelby Cinca’s father had died around the time Frodus recorded And We Washed Our Weapons in the Sea. His father had suffered a stroke.

Jason Hamacher doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would be drawn to a place like Syria.

“I am the son of a Southern Baptist minister,” he says. “I was born in Texas, I have no cultural ties or blood ties whatsoever to the Middle East, or to the populations that inhabit the Middle East.”

Back in the early 2000s, Hamacher was a punk drummer in Washington, D.C., playing in several hardcore bands. A little musical competition between friends changed the direction of his whole life.

“We each challenged ourselves, saying each person has to find something online that we could write music to, and report back to each other,” he says. “So a couple of days later, a friend of mine calls, and said, ‘Hey. I found this really amazing chant from Serbia that you should check out.’ It was a bad phone connection, and I completely misunderstood him and thought he said ‘Syria.'”

He wasn’t a trained musicologist or photographer. But beginning in 2006, he made several trips to Syria, taking photos and recording music he found along the way. He documented many of Syria’s diverse minority communities, including Jews, Sufi Muslims and several different Christian denominations. He’s been releasing those recordings, one by one, on his own label.

His most recent release is an album that Hamacher made at a 15th-century Armenian church in Aleppo. It’s just one priest, Yeznig Zegchanian, chanting.

“It’s the famed Forty Martyrs church, and it’s the actual voice inside the church, which is what really makes the album so special,” Hamacher explains. “The songs are common songs. They can be heard throughout the liturgical year. There’s nothing rare about the songs.”

But the church and its neighborhood are another matter. The Armenian neighborhood of Judayda was a place where everybody went. It’s full, Hamacher says, of “really windy back alleys, and it opens up onto this really amazing square that’s lined with restaurants, trees and silver shops.”

“It was always one of those magical places where you had multiple communities living together, says Elyse Semerdjian, a historian of Syria at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash. “From neighborhood to neighborhood, you could switch languages, from Armenian to Kurdish to Turkish to Arabic.”

Semerdjian comes from an Armenian family from Aleppo, and she wrote the liner notes for Zegchanian and Hamacher’s Forty Martyrs: Armenian Chanting from Aleppo. She says the city became important to Armenians many centuries ago, because of Armenia’s religious heritage. Armenia officially became a Christian country 1700 years ago, in the year 301.

“You know, Aleppo was always situated along a pilgrimage route to Jerusalem,” she says. “And so we have very early accounts of Armenians who passed through Aleppo, and stayed in Aleppo for a period of time.”

Semerdjian says that Aleppo became even more of a refuge after 1915, when up to a million and a half Armenians were killed or deported from the Ottoman Empire.

“When the Armenian genocide took place in 1915,” Semerdjian says, “Aleppo was one of the major deportation routes for Armenians, where, on what were, in effect, death marches, that people were very lucky to survive. If they survived them at all, they ended up, many of them, in Aleppo.”

Father Zegchanian was born in Aleppo. He was first recorded by Jason Hamacher in 2006. Hamacher returned to Forty Martyrs four years later to try to record him again. But a deacon refused to even let him speak to Father Zegchanian until the priest himself happened to walk by — and Hamacher chased after him.

“It’s like, ‘I don’t know if you remember me,'” Hamacher recounts. “‘I would love to record an record with you inside the church. He’s like, ‘OK.'”

“‘Oh, that’s great!'” Hamacher continues. “And then he just started walking into the church. I was like, ‘Wait, not now, I don’t have my stuff!’ He’s like, ‘Yes.’ I was like, ‘Yes, you’ll do it? Or … yes to later?’ It’s like, ‘OK … let me go get my equipment!'”

And that recording, made totally on the fly, became an important historical document of an Aleppo that is nearly gone. In April of this year, the church of Forty Martyrs was bombed.

“At first, it seemed that the church, and everything related to the church, was completely destroyed,” Hamacher says. “And fortunately, it turned out to just be the courtyard and complex related to the church.”

Hamacher hasn’t been able to contact Father Zegchanian in the past couple of years. And he hasn’t been able to go back to Syria because of the war — but he says that’s made his work all the more urgent.

“Major portions of the iconic symbolism of that city has been wrecked and destroyed,” Hamacher says emphatically. “The importance to continue at least the memory of these places is to keep the arts going. That’s my attempt, you know, that’s my contribution, is trying to represent these communities in a way that is informational, respectful, artistic and honorable.”

In the meantime, Hamacher is eager to share what he’s collected. He’s working on a book of photos from Aleppo, and says that he’ll be releasing an album a year of music from Syria, as long as he’s got material.

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

The project got its start when Hamacher read in a book about “the world’s oldest Christian music.” He tracked down From the Holy Mountain author William Dalrymple, who told him there were no recordings of the music — and that “it’s not a monastery in the desert; it is a Syrian Orthodox church in the middle of the city of Aleppo.” Hamacher ended up staying at that church as a guest of the archbishop, who has since been kidnapped by rebels.

As Hamacher tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross, he is planning a series of albums called Sacred Voices of Syria. The first, which was released this summer on his own Lost Origin Productions, is called Nawa: Ancient Sufi Invocations and Forgotten Songs From Aleppo. Hamacher isn’t coming at this from the perspective of a musicologist, or as a member of a religious community. He’s a drummer who’s played in several punk bands in the Washington, D.C., area, including Frodus, Decahedron and Regents. You can hear their conversation at the audio link.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.