“I was just like ‘OK, this is a girl zine, this is gonna be great. I was being really sarcastic about it because I really like to focus on the inclusiveness of things,’” says Skeiky, who also works in food PR. “My ideal is always, ‘Why doesn’t every zine just have more female contributions?’”

But Skeiky eventually warmed up to the idea because Scharbach and Martinez had a strict rule: female-identified contributors only.

John Scharbach — better known as Crucial John, the vocalist of D.C. hardcore band Give — has spearheaded other zines before. He met Martinez, an artist and then-prospective American University student, at a Give show in her home state of Florida. He dug her art, so Scharbach advised Skeiky (an occasional Bandwidth contributor) to follow Martinez on Instagram.

Skeiky tapped “follow,” and out of this 21st century friendship, a 20th century zine emerged.

Skeiky took all the photos for Strawberry Dreams, mostly of live performances from punkish bands like Gouge Away, Downtown Boys and D.C.’s Sneaks and Priests. Martinez contributed a heap of drawings and a piece of writing, which opens the zine. Crucial John, the token man, handled layout and passed out the final product while touring Europe with Give.

“I think it’s important for everybody to consume media that makes them kind of uncomfortable.” —Farrah Skeiky

“I think it’s really good that [Crucial John] was part of this idea because he’s just being a really good male ally to women in the scene,” says Skeiky. “He’s setting a really good example — he’s not using his voice in the scene, which is a pretty strong one, to decide what should be in it. He’s using his voice [for] something everybody should be reading regardless of their gender.”

The zine’s founders stress that while Strawberry Dreams skews female-identified, they think everyone can — and should — read it. Skeiky points out that while cultural products created by men are considered open to all audiences, products made by women are often seen as specialized, or for women only.

“I think it’s important for everybody to consume media that makes them kind of uncomfortable,” Skeiky says, “because it means that you’re reading about something that you don’t know a lot about… or something that [makes you] realize you feel guilty [because] you haven’t given it much thought.”

Skeiky, Martinez and Crucial John plan to produce more issues of Strawberry Dreams this fall — with Issue No. 2 expected to arrive in the next month — and they’ll keep the finished product short and free of charge. After that, they may reevaluate both the zine’s size and cost. They say they’ve already been flooded with submission inquiries, so serious growth could arrive seriously soon.

The team’s distribution plan is a wonderful mix of old- and new-school: They distribute hard copies at shows, while folks with the digital PDF version are encouraged to email it far and wide.

The zine’s aesthetic is clearly influenced — like a lot of subculture right now — by the 1990s. But Skeiky and her partners (who have only been in the same room once, at a recent Ceremony show) want to go broader.

“There’s no denying that we’re not influenced by older punk zines, especially older riot grrrl kind of zines,” says Skeiky. “But we also recognize that there were a lot of things missing at the time from early riot grrrl zines, because that feminism was primarily for white women… and feminism can mean different things to different women.”

Hard copies of Strawberry Dreams are available at Joint Custody, Upshur Street Books, Smash Records and Meats & Foods. To get a copy in the mail, email your mailing address to strawberrydreamsfanzine@gmail.com. The zine’s second issue is forthcoming.

Strawberry Dreams Fanzine: Issue No. 1

WAMU is licensed to American University.

Ten minutes later, Scharbach swapped the frisbee for a microphone. He bounded onstage, pumped up to play D.C.’s Fort Reno summer concert series for the third time with his group, GIVE, D.C.’s most boundary-pushing hardcore band. It would be another three months before the band released its debut LP, Electric Flower Circus.

After ample time in the studio, a wait at the pressing plant and many dollars spent, that record finally arrived today. (Stream it below.)

In a scene that tends to adhere to a dress code of jorts and black T-shirts, GIVE is all sportswear and trainers, sometimes even Oxfords and selvedge denim. Its sound lives outside of the confines of D.C. hardcore, too: The five-piece skirts the classic faster-louder formula, referencing ’90s alt-rock just as often as it borrows from early Dischord.

Scharbach says he would be proud to say GIVE springs from D.C.’s rich punk heritage. But part of the band’s aesthetic seems inherited from Haight-Ashbury instead of the District. Its art and song titles emit a whiff of patchouli: A white flower logo adorns its 7-inch singles, which come with names like “I Am Love,” “Flowerhead” and “Petal Pushing.” Electric Flower Circus looks utterly psychedelic. No stern faces and black X’s here.

“In the hardcore punk scene we came up in, the imagery was a lot darker,” Scharbach says. But he felt drawn to more positive symbols, like the flowers of the paisley 1960s and Britpop 1990s. That imagery became “a floral foundation we just built off of,” he says. “Flowers became our thing.”

“In the hardcore punk scene we came up in, the imagery was a lot darker,” says GIVE vocalist John Scharbach. “Flowers became our thing.”

In a city both enriched and constrained by its legendary hardcore scene, GIVE seems respectful of the past, but not handcuffed to it. The 13-song Electric Flower Circus aims to further stretch its oeuvre—and the limits of hardcore.

The record won’t sound unrecognizable to fans; it still weds the pounding pace of Fugazi-bred hardcore with a little Lungfish and the band’s other myriad influences. But this time, the guitars sounds cleaner, and Scharbach does, too, in a way: he sings more and growls less. Some moments on the album even enter dancey territory. The frontman says that from his close vantage point, it’s tough to identify what’s different on this record. But eventually he describes Electric Flower Circus as “more rock-and-rollish” compared to the band’s previous stuff.

GIVE’s sound isn’t the only thing getting a rethink on Electric Flower Circus: The LP also marks the band’s return to self-publishing after a string of rendezvouses with other labels. GIVE dropped the full-length on its own imprint—the appropriately crunchy-sounding Moonflower Records, which only has one prior release: the band’s 2009 12-inch of demo recordings. After that EP, GIVE dropped five 7-inch singles on five labels, all run by the band’s friends in the scene.

Not that GIVE is done with other shops. In fact, it’s now collaborating with two of the heftiest labels it’s worked with yet. Big-deal hardcore label Revelation Records plans to release Sonic Bloom, a five-song GIVE EP, which the band recorded and mastered at legendary Arlington studio Inner Ear over the summer. Then there’s its single due out on top Boston hardcore imprint Lockin’ Out. Both releases, expected to come out this year, will include material from GIVE’s full-length as well as some exclusive songs.

Working with big hardcore indies hasn’t always interested GIVE. The band says it was approached by some in the past, but they never felt like a good fit. For one of the most eclectic bands in hardcore, hopping on a label with a bunch of other hardcore acts didn’t seem ideal. “We never wanted to be boxed in like that,” Scharbach says.

“We don’t want our band to be on iPhone cases,” says GIVE drummer Gene Melkisethian. “We don’t want our band to be a product.”

Plus, some of those bigger labels could have pushed GIVE in a more commercial direction, which the five-piece has never felt comfortable with, according to drummer Gene Melkisethian. “We don’t want our band to be on iPhone cases,” he says. “We don’t want our band to be a product.”

Revelation and Lockin’ Out seemed different. Melkisethian says he’s known the folks who run Lockin’ Out for years, and Revelation’s distribution network and name recognition made it hard to pass up. But GIVE didn’t want to put its LP in anyone else’s hands. For that, they wanted creative and financial control. “We knew that if we financed it, we could put more money into it than a label would,” Melkisethian says.

Besides, the band sold about 1,200 copies of its self-released 2009 EP, and they felt confident they could do it again. Electric Flower Circus hasn’t been cheap—when we talked over the summer, GIVE had spent about $5,000 on the record, most of it earned from touring—but the creative and economic freedom that comes with going DIY seems worth the money, Melkisethian says.

“That’s kind of the tradition in D.C.,” says the drummer. “We think it’s a good thing.”

Warning: Explicit lyrics.