“My parents are super conservative Christians,” says the songwriter from Rockville, Maryland. “That was kind of my experience and my upbringing — and I was a part of that for a really long time.”

Smith would go on to form a Christian-leaning band called Kindlewood. But her feelings toward religion began to change while studying at the Christ for the Nations Institute in Dallas, Texas. She felt herself drifting away from her religious community.

That’s the message within “This Fabric,” a song Smith recorded with her new band, Citrine.

The tune is “a declaration of needing to cut ties from a lot of my past and a lot of things that I was afraid about writing about,” says Smith.

“I won’t play that game/Always second-guessing forward motion,” she sings on the dreamy pop track, her vocals complemented by bright electronics and tropical notes. “This fabric is suffocating.”

In contrast to Kindlewood — a group entrenched in the then-trendy folk scene — Citrine sounds like a cousin of ethereal rockers the Cocteau Twins. But Smith says the band takes care to draw from a variety of sources, from Lauryn Hill to Santana.

“I really tried to dig back into what I listened to in high school,” says Smith, “even though I wasn’t really allowed to listen to much outside of Christian radio.”

Smith recognizes that her new direction could be alienating to people from her past, including her family. But her siblings also play secular-ish music: Her brother, Josh Tillman, is otherwise known as Father John Misty, and her other brother Zach records as Pearly Gate Music. These days, Smith says she’s ready to be vulnerable, while exercising her creativity in the process.

Citrine is rounded out by guitarist Galen Smith (Kelci’s husband, who also played in Kindlewood) and drummer Beau Cole. Based in Baltimore, the trio recorded “This Fabric” in a factory that produces bridge supports. The space smells like chemicals, Smith says, and it hums with activity during the week. But Citrine recorded its entire debut EP, April, in one weekend, wrapping in time for workers to return Monday.

The prolific recording session may have benefited from luck — which is apt, given the meaning behind the band’s moniker.

“I picked the name Citrine because I wanted a little bit of luck,” Smith says, “and the crystal citrine is supposed to bring happiness… and good fortune.”

Citrine’s debut EP, April, comes out April 22.

On the third single from the band’s forthcoming EP, songwriter Jay Nemeyer nods to bands like Phantogram and Sohn, who texturize their electronic music with organic sounds.

Thematically, “Rain” (listen below) flows with the rest of the EP, depicting a last-ditch attempt to save a drowning relationship. At the heart of the track is a relentless, alarmlike vocal drone that triggers a wave of intensity, like the downpour in which the narrator seems caught — and Nemeyer throws in a few layers of sound to build a foggy atmosphere.

Combined, those elements add up to the band’s heaviest single to date, which seems to be the point.

“It’s about the compounding effect loss in one area of your life can have on the rest,” Nemeyer says.

Color Palette plays Aug. 15 at Ghost Office in College Park, Maryland.

But “Walls Closing In,” a standout from Dot Dash’s latest album, Earthquakes & Tidal Waves, is a change of pace. (Listen below.)

“It’s kind of the heaviest song on the record, and probably the heaviest song that this band has ever done,” says guitarist and vocalist Terry Banks, 50, who’s played in Glo-Worm, Tree Fort Angst and St. Christopher in addition to The Saturday People and Julie Ocean. (Dot Dash’s other guitarist, Steve Hansgen, once played in Minor Threat.) “I’m not saying it’s some incredibly visceral thing — music gets a whole lot heavier than that. But for us, it’s pretty heavy.”

By contrast, other album cuts sound almost sweet.

“The song before it [“Tatters“] is a very light, jangly pop song, so I felt like the obvious thing to follow it up with would be the heaviest song on the record,” Banks says. “And it’s not like this cliché of ending the album with the heavy rocker. It’s kind of right in the middle, and maybe it forms a midway point or apex or something like that.”

But despite being heavier than the rest of the album, “Walls Closing In” is undoubtedly the work of Dot Dash — which is to say, it’s a shrink wrap-tight pop song.

As for the song’s lyrics, Banks isn’t getting too bogged down by details. “I don’t feel like any songs that I ever come up with are necessarily specifically about anything,” he says. “They’re kind of arrived at in a sort of instinctive way.”

Rather than moving from one concrete point to another, a lot of Banks’ lyrics tend to be semi-impressionistic, drawing from a stream-of-consciousness writing style. He says that he tends to feel like songs come out of thin air, “but then I’ll realize that that chorus or that phrase sort of relates to some passing thought or some conversation I had.”

But before you try to start ascribing meaning to Banks’ lyrical style, he makes one thing clear: “We have no message, there is no message.” Dot Dash songs are open to interpretation that way.

“The message is whatever you take from it,” Banks says.

Dot Dash plays an album release show at Comet Ping Pong Friday, April 24.

Photos by: Maggie Famiglietti