This weekend the two musicians, who play in Northern Virginia pop-punk band American Television, are putting on the inaugural Breakin’ Even Fest at Songbyrd Music House & Record Cafe in D.C.

“As we’ve gotten into our 30s and life has progressed,” Flowers says, “it’s gotten harder and harder to do some of the touring and other things that bands do.” But that doesn’t mean they’re bowing out of music altogether.

Taking place March 4 and 5, Breakin’ Even Fest will feature more than a dozen bands from across the D.C. region, including local favorites Lilac Daze and Loud Boyz, as well as New York rockers Iron Chic and Timeshares.

The fest focuses on tuneful punk rock, a style Flowers says he doesn’t encounter enough in the D.C. scene.

“There’s a lot going on in D.C. already,” the drummer says, “but we saw a little bit of a void in the music that we really like — melodic pop-punk with a little bit of a hard edge.”

D.C.’s biggest punk festival, Damaged City, specializes in a faster and more aggressive side of the music. Flowers says that fest “is really great, but it’s not really the music that Steve and I like.”

To help pay for the event, Rovery and Flowers have arranged a number of local sponsors, including Mobius Records and vinyl-pressing company Furnace Manufacturing, which have each donated merchandise to be raffled off over the course of the weekend. Rovery says each “mystery merch pack,” given away a few times each night, will be worth around $200.

In addition to the ticket prices — an affordable $27.50 for the entire weekend — proceeds from the raffles will go directly to the bands. Rovery and Flowers won’t be taking any for themselves.

“We came up with the name Breakin’ Even is because our goal is to break even,” Rovery says, “but first and foremost we need to make sure the bands get paid.”

Breakin’ Even Fest takes place March 4 to 5 at Songbyrd Music House and Record Cafe in Adams Morgan.

Flip through the jukebox at the Black Cat in Washington, D.C., and you’ll find The Modern Lovers’ self-titled album, The Best Of The Ronettes, the No Thanks! ’70s Punk Rebellion comp (for The Undertones’ crucial “Teenage Kicks”), and some recent music from the area’s finest, like Ex Hex and Priests. Since May, however, you could also spend a few bucks on something that wasn’t even out yet: The Max Levine Ensemble‘s first album in eight years, Backlash, Baby. With his tongue in his cheek, guitarist and vocalist David Combs told DCist, “Sorry it’s such an expensive stream,” giving a little something to the friends and fans that have heard these songs live so many times. Now released from its five-plays-for-$2 preview, Backlash, Baby is a desperate, full-tilt pop-punk record that’s just trying to make sense of a backwards world.

Formed in the D.C. suburbs as high-schoolers in 2000, The Max Levine Ensemble’s members witnessed the last years of punk bands Q And Not U and Black Eyes, and remained steadfast with a handful of others when the city moved on to other music. Their songs were snotty and short and silly, but also earnest, catching the attention of pop-punk tastemakers (with releases on Plan-It-X and Asian Man) and the ire of ornery pop-punk musician/podcaster Ben Weasel, resulting in some cheeky revenge.

Like the the near-decade it took to make, there’s no rush to Backlash, Baby: Songs stretch past the three-minute mark, the production is robust, and the concise-yet-lush arrangements bely the band’s guitar-bass-drums format. The 1-2-3 punch that opens the album is a good indicator of how far The Max Levine Ensemble has come, with the title track swinging wide and hard into the anthemic “My Valerian.” The mid-tempo rocker chases bliss in tongue-twisted herbal sedatives (“Kava kava chameleon / Boswellia geranium / They call her the setting sun / But she’s my valerian”) and a beefy hook somewhere between Pixies and The Rentals. Like its excellent Bond-inspired music video, “Sun’s Early Rays” is taut and action-packed, spiraling downward in frantically struck chords and Nick Popvici’s dramatic drum rolls.

In eight years, Combs has developed considerably as a lyricist and songwriter under the name Spoonboy. That venture is decidedly more pop, split between solo acoustic numbers and full-band orchestrations while exploring identity and politics with insight and curiosity. (He retired the name in June while promising new projects.) He continues that thread on Backlash, acknowledging that the personal is political. The songs engage rather than point fingers at what it means to be American, hitting hardest in “Fall Of The Constellations.” That track’s rhythmic urgency is akin to Ted Leo or the late Jay Reatard: “If we are the core, the uninformed / We are the ones whose votes are counted / We still do nothing about it.” The piano-driven “American” swells like a ragtag Bruce Springsteen rallying cry, delivered by Combs’ nasal tenor and bassist Ben Epstein’s hearty shout, each spurred to furious punk-rock speed as they question the wars that have shaped the country.

Where Combs makes sense of the world in clever and affecting lines, Epstein — who tends to write about parties, pizza and euphoria — closes Backlash, Baby on a bittersweet note. “Going Home Part I” is a quiet, campfire-intimate song that’s over before it begins, but it sets the tone for part two and a happy-go-lucky Bo Diddley beat that’s at odds with the melancholy themes at hand. “Things will get better once we leave the winter far behind,” Epstein sings with a gang of friends, a sentiment echoed in a charming documentary about his efforts to make the most of a summer. It’s a sentiment that captures how we grow from our silly-yet-earnest teenage years into people with age and hurt and triumph. Here’s hoping it won’t be another eight years before The Max Levine Ensemble returns for another round.

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

Polyon, Blue EP
Recommended track: “Faults”

The latest from post-rockers Polyon is called Blue, but don’t think it’s a sob story. “These songs aren’t about being sad,” frontman Ryan McLaughlin tells CMJ.com. “They are about awareness and an inner shift that occurs as you get over berating yourself for your flaws.” Not that Polyon’s blown-out EP (out Nov. 13) contains zero berating — it sounds like drummer Brandon Korch is angry at his kit. Polyon plays Nov. 20 at Songbyrd.

The Split Seconds, self-titled
Recommended track: “Cutting Out” (video)

The Split Seconds call themselves “classic pop punk,” aligning their sound with English groups The Clash, The Buzzcocks and The Damned. But there’s a lot of Southern California on the band’s debut full-length, too — particularly in vocalist Drew Champion’s sneer. (While you’re scanning The Split Seconds’ tunes, I recommend reading this fascinating article about the so-called pop-punk accent.)

Swings, Sugarwater
Recommended track: “Dust”

The last time Bandwidth chatted with D.C. slacker-rock outfit Swings, they told us they had gotten really into Chicago footwork. Now the band has evidently embraced Auto-Tune, as heard on Track No. 1 from Sugarwater, out Nov. 13. But while the effect forces vocalist Jamie Finucane to conform to a pitch, the slurry singer still sounds uninterested in enunciation. Swings plays Dec. 4 at Songbyrd.

Top photo: Young Trynas, July 14.

On a record full of fast-paced, catchy shout-alongs, “My Valerian” is the chunky, mid-tempo rock anthem with the perverse melodic sweetness of Pixies and the clean-cut backbone of The Rentals. While guitarist David Combs has always been an earnest lyricist, his long-running (and recently retired) solo vehicle Spoonboy has taught him to convey more with less, clipping the first verse with the terse, “I woke up in transit, panicked, and screaming.” Combs plays with words, twirling herbal sedatives (“Kava kava, chamomeleon / Boswellia geranium”) around in his mouth as a sort-of love song to escaping anxiety and chasing bliss, “My valerian.”

In the band-directed video, its members are captured by evil doctors and Combs’ brain is replaced by a doomsday device. Ben Levin, writer for Steven Universe and creator of the web series, Doris & Mary Anne Are Breaking Out Of Prison, provides some trippy animation when things get weird. It’s the second of a three-part series, the prequel to the thrilling video for “Sun’s Early Rays,” which not only features Priests‘ Katie Alice-Greer and Ilsa‘s Sharad Satsangi as your next Bond and Bond Villain, but also a whole crew of D.C. friends and musicians plotting The Max Levine Ensemble’s demise.

Backlash, Baby comes out Nov. 20 on Lame-O and Rumbletowne.

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

American Television is a pop-punk band. That will be clear from watching this video, even with the sound turned off. It’s got jump kicks, NOFX T-shirts in youth large, old-school Vans, a burrito, gang vocals and a singer — Steve Rovery — who appears to have earned his doctorate degree from the Milo Aukerman Institute of Advanced Pop-Punk Studies.

Helmed by Mike Watkins, the quirky video smacks of the kind of pop-punk schtick that hasn’t been around since people were buying Bowling For Soup records. In it, American Television books a show and charges into an intense regimen of preparation and promotion. The band’s members hit the gym, practice obsessively and crush Tex-Mex food — only to wind up playing to an empty room. No one shows, even though the gig’s both all-ages and free.

Perhaps that’s the picture of true optimism: perfecting songs only to play them in a void.

“Optimist” appears on American Television’s forthcoming digital-only EP, Let’s Play Two. The band plays Aug. 15 at St. Stephen’s Church with Boardroom Heroes, The Rememberables, Canker Blossom and Six Foot Machine (and hopefully people show up).

Ask any DIY musician why they play music or why they go on tour, and they’re probably not going to tell you they’re in it for the money. They’ll say they do it because they love it, or because there’s something inside of them that compels them to hit the road. But money is still part of the picture, and a lack of it can take even small-scale musicians off the road, swiftly and indiscriminately.

Most DIY artists aren’t spending nearly $18,000 on hotels and food like the band Pomplamoose did last year. But that doesn’t mean we don’t face risks.

Say your band’s van breaks down when you’re making less than $100 a night on tour. There’s a good chance that tour is over, or at best, it will be a while till your next one. When gas prices go up, that money’s coming out of your food budget. Packed too many CDs and not enough T-shirts? That’s money lost, too.

I spent the better part of four months on tour in 2014 with my solo project, Spoonboy, and I’ve been touring for more than 12 years with my punk band, The Max Levine Ensemble. I consider myself a part of a strange community of punk and DIY musicians who make music regardless of economic incentives. But no tour can happen without some consideration of money. And since it’s not something we’re prone to bringing up, people outside of our world might not understand how crucial it is, even for artists playing living rooms.

Before DIY bands even begin to think about widely discussed issues like income from online streaming, they’re more likely to be thinking about the basics: gas, vehicle expenses, food, merch, lodging — and one factor that’s a little more nebulous: reciprocity for people who helped them on tour.

I talked to a few musician friends about the lesser-known but fundamental costs of small-scale touring, with the goal of sharing — for both showgoers and bands — what DIY musicians experience on the road.

Gasoline

It gets you around, so you won’t get around it.

On tour, nothing is more certain than the next stop at the gas station. DIY bands easily spend most of their tour money on petroleum.

The last several months saw sinking gas prices, but that’s unusual, and already reversing. Jeff Rosenstock — who plays solo and formerly with punk band Bomb the Music Industry — says that traditionally, gas prices have risen much faster than many musicians’ incomes.

“Gas prices change more than anything,” Rosenstock says. They “increase so much more than the amount that minimum wage has increased over the past 15 years.”

He’s right. Between June 1999 and June 2014, gas prices rose by 216 percent before they began to slide. The federal minimum wage increased by 41 percent in the same amount of time.

The cost of fuel looms so large that some bands get desperate. Take Chris Moore, who plays in D.C. hardcore bands Coke Bust, Sick Fix and DOC. He says he went to extremes to avoid paying for gas on one of his first tours.

“Me and the roadie in the band would take these five gallon gas containers, put them in contractor bags, sneak around at night, find some poor guy’s car and steal as much gas as possible.” — Chris Moore, Coke Bust

“I was like, ‘All right, we’re gonna steal gas every single night,'” he says. “And that’s how we’re going to make it work.”

Moore’s band at the time, Magrudergrind, bought a hand-pump syphon so they wouldn’t have to slurp gas out of people’s tanks with their mouths, and picked up bags and two large gas canisters.

“Me and the roadie in the band would take these five gallon gas containers, put them in contractor bags, sneak around at night, find some poor guy’s car and steal as much gas as possible,” Moore says.

Eventually, the hardcore band had second thoughts. “It ended up getting so sketchy. We were playing a lot of country towns. Who knows, maybe some of these people [had] guns,” Moore says. “If I caught someone stealing gas from me, I don’t know what I would do. So we just gave up after two weeks. More trouble than it [was] worth.”

Vehicle

Get in the van.

Vehicle expenses can sometimes top gas prices, but they’re far more circumstantial. They depend on questions of renting versus owning and how reliable and fuel-efficient the mode of transportation is.

“I’ve always gone back and forth between being in a band that owns its own vehicle to renting something every time we go out,” Moore says. “On the renting side, is it renting something that’s brand new or renting something that belongs to someone? As much as I love saving a little bit of money by renting a vehicle from a friend, there have been so many instances where that vehicle has broken down or it’s so old that its gas efficiency is so bad that we might as well have rented something brand new.”

You can cut out rental expenses if you own your vehicle, but the liability is a real gamble. Say a deer runs into your car on the highway, knocks a part in your radiator loose and that leads to a busted transmission. There goes your tour fund, and probably a good portion of your savings. (Not that this happened to me. OK, it did.) Plus, the cost of maintaining a van driven tens of thousands of miles a year adds up.

Fuel-efficient vehicles, alternative fuel, driving shorter distances between shows — they’re all useful tricks to cut costs. But paying for gas adds up no matter what.

On my own tours, I’ve tried everything from hitchhiking to scamming fake Greyhound Bus passes to find a way around these costs. But I’ve always ended up in the same place: back in the van.

Food

Meet the chips-and-salsa sandwich.

This one seems obvious. You’ve got to eat. But talk to a touring band about how food is paid for, and you’ll find it’s a hot topic.

“I think everyone in our band at some point skips a meal or two just because we couldn’t afford to be eating out every day,” says Radiator Hospital guitarist Sam Cook-Parrott. Most musicians don’t have the budget to be eating out for every meal, of course — but when you’re living out of your van, you don’t have a choice.

Musicians on tour routinely keep food costs down by flirting with malnutrition.

“We used to get ramen and just crinkle it up in the package and pour the sprinkles on it and have ramen chips. That’s what we would eat for every meal,” Rosenstock says.

Every band has their version of this, whether it’s peanut butter and jelly or one of my personal favorites: the chips-and-salsa sandwich. Musicians on tour routinely keep food costs down by flirting with malnutrition. Ideally the tour should pay for the food, but it’s not always possible.

“If the tour is doing well, then we’ll pay for food out of the tour fund,” Moore says, speaking of his various bands’ routines.“We’ll do a per diem, like a $5 or $10 per day per diem. Or when the band goes out to eat, the band will just pay for it. I kind of prefer that because that means you get to order dessert.”

Even then, food expenses can be a source of interpersonal drama.

“Sometimes people take advantage of it,” Moore says. “There are situations where everyone’s ordered this food except for this last person, and the last person orders two appetizers, a side and a dessert, and you’re like, ‘Damn man, come on!'”

Merch

Spend money to make money.

Merchandise sales account for a big portion of tour income. But producing records, shirts and other goods is also one of a band’s biggest expenses.

“You’re spending money up front, and then earning it back slowly by selling the records,” Cook-Parrott tells me. “After all the money I spent on the tour and getting ready for the tour, when we got home I had about as much after the tour as when we left. In some ways it’s almost like, ‘Did that even happen? Was this a dream?’”

Estimating how much to spend on merchandise is always tough, too. “We went on one tour where we only had CDs and then the CDs sold out really quickly,” says Gabrielle Smith of New York bands Eskimeaux, Frankie Cosmos, Bellows and Told Slant. “Then on [our most recent] tour we had T-shirts, vinyl and CDs — and we bought way too many CDs and not enough shirts at all. We ran out of shirts after four days of being on tour.”

But Moore says merch is an inescapable expense.

“It’s sad to say, but you can’t really do a big tour without having some sort of merch to cover costs,” the drummer says. “It doesn’t mean that you need to have 10 different T-shirt designs and beer koozies and shot glasses or whatever, but you need to have something, because there are going to be times when you don’t get anything from the door — or what you get from the door is so small that it’s only enough for a bean burrito at Taco Bell.”

Lodging

We’re crashing on the floor tonight.

Most bands operating even at the edge of DIY learn that hotel rooms are a no-go. You quickly find yourself inside a network of fellow musicians and their friends who can lend you a couch, bed, floor — or, in the best cases, a guest room.

“Spending your money on a hotel every night, especially when you’re a band just starting out, that’s kind of a waste of money,” Rosenstock says. “Even if you’re a band who’s beyond just starting out, that’s a waste of your experience.”

Plus, crashing with people usually leads to new friendships. “We have these really wonderful tour friends who we would never have met otherwise,” Smith says. Almost everyone I spoke to expressed similar sentiments.

“It’s very rare that you’re ever gonna take a plane trip to Lima, Ohio, to visit your friends,” Moore says. “The only time you’re ever gonna do it is when you’re driving to Illinois on tour.”

In the event that you can’t find a place to crash, you’re left with a choice between booking a hotel and getting a good night’s rest in the van at a Walmart parking lot. Depending on how you respond to that quandary, lodging can also be a major cost.

Reciprocity

It’s the backbone of DIY.

In the world of DIY touring, reciprocity is tough to quantify, or even count as an expense. But it’s definitely a big part of the picture.

Here’s how reciprocity works: If your band from D.C. plays a show with an out-of-towner, you play for free so the touring act gets the door money. When you play out of town, local bands do the same for you. That local band could also help book a show for you in their town, and repay you that way.

“I started booking shows for friends, and then I started playing in a band,” says All Dogs bassist Amanda Bartley, “and just through going on tour and making those connections, you become friends with people in bands. And you’re like, ‘I book shows here, could you book a show for me in your town sometime?’”

The informal gift economy attracts a lot of people to DIY, but it can fall short of meeting bands’ needs.

Moore echoes the importance of this arrangement. “I don’t know if I believe in karma, but I think it’s important to pay it forward.”

That informal gift economy attracts a lot of people to DIY, whether it’s for political reasons or just the romance, but it can also fall short of meeting bands’ needs.

“DIY booking feels like a very personal interaction, and it feels like a very favor-based gifting and owing system. It’s very precariously balanced,” Smith says. “When there’s a booking agent involved, it becomes a business interaction that’s sort of missing from the DIY version.”

And that’s where some of the more interesting economic questions start to pop up. While many bands have found success and longevity operating on a strictly DIY model, others might turn to a booking agent or publicist to try and alleviate some of the challenges a band faces in our bleak economic landscape.

To what extent those things are useful solutions really depends on the band. But these days it’s not hard to find bands with one foot in a traditional DIY ethic, and the other in a more professional approach to marketing music.

And that makes sense. As the prevailing music industry model has crumbled, musicians of all stripes have been experimenting with new models for success, and the lines between the DIY and the professional have blurred. So we’re talking about it.

Stay tuned for Combs’ next installment in a series of essays about the DIY music economy.

Photos by Flickr users Incase, Andrew Taylor, Les Chatfield, Will Fisher, Christian Kadluba and baronsquirrel.

Today Bandwidth premieres “Grayest Places,” the seventh track from the band’s LP out Feb. 24 on Broken World Media. The song is perhaps the album’s best snapshot of what Makeshift Shelters is at the moment: a band that’s now entrenched in the world of indie pop, but still attracted to midtempo drums and punk riffs. Vocalist Ella Boissonnault layers yearning, defiant lyrics and sustained melodies over driving beats and post-punk guitar that’s both jagged and punishing. It’s the band’s cornerstone approach, executed with finesse and clamor.

Stream “Grayest Places,” above. Something So Personal is available for preorder now before its official arrival.

Last month, Bandwidth’s Ron Knox predicted that D.C. emo-punk band Makeshift Shelters could grow into one of D.C.’s biggest rock exports, starting with its forthcoming debut LP, Something So Personal. Thursday the band premiered the first track from that album, and sure enough, it sounds like it’s got enough gas in the tank to take the band far beyond the D.C. punk scene.

“Opposite Directions” premiered yesterday on AbsolutePunk.net. Right away, it sounds like a beefed-up version of Makeshift Shelters’ best songs so far — melodic enough to satisfy any pop nerd’s sweet tooth, but toughened up with chugging riffs and an F bomb lurking in the track’s hook.

Something So Personal arrives Feb. 24 on Broken World Media, and it’s available for preorder now on fancy colored vinyl and CD. Update: Hear more tunes from the album on Makeshift Shelters’ Bandcamp page.

Read our recent feature on Makeshift Shelters.

Warning: Explicit lyrics.

‘Overflowing’

In February, the songs on Overflowing will also appear on Makeshift Shelters’ debut LP, Something So Personal, a collection of songs that have been under construction since Virginia natives Boissonnault, Andrew Clark and Phil Edfors began playing together in 2013. The EP’s three tunes foretell an LP that could bring much bigger things for the band, which formed with the stated goal of playing genteel music.

“I got a call from Phil,” says Clark, who plays guitar. “He said, ‘I hate heavy music. Let’s start a chill band.’”

Both Clark and Edfors cut their teeth in the local punk scene. Their new drummer, Nate Patsfall — who joined in late 2014 after a previous member quit — has a penchant for grindcore. Punk is in their blood. But it felt like time for a change.

Their idea was to start an airy slowcore band like Codeine. They hijacked the name Makeshift Shelters from a droney Gregor Samsa song. But the budding ensemble’s songs weren’t turning out droney. They were louder and faster than what they intended, and Edfors says he couldn’t sing. It dawned on them: “We need someone who is actually good at music to do this with us,” the bassist says.

Boissonnault came from a different musical world: Her parents guided her towards piano lessons, and classical music eventually became the backdrop to her aspiring dance career. By the time Boissonnault was performing in public, she tended to play more coffee shops than DIY spaces.

“From the very beginning, we wanted to do the band correctly with the purpose of being able to get it to as many people as possible and have it be sustainable.” — Makeshift Shelters’ Andrew Clark

But Makeshift Shelters began in a DIY space. Clark and Edfors approached Boissonnault at a basement show after she played a solo set under the moniker Ella Sophia, and after a couple of drinks, Edfors and Clark jovially suggested they all start a band together. When they did, they quickly started to drift from their slowcore aspirations.

Clark says Makeshift Shelters has been called emo before. That almost makes sense; all of its recordings — including its first EP, released last year — have been affiliated with Broken World Media, the label run by Derrick Shanholtzer of emo flagbearers The World Is A Beautiful Place And I Am No Longer Afraid To Die. Their labelmates and future tourmates — including Soda Bomb, which shares a bill with Makeshift Shelters tonight at The Commune — all hail from that musical neck of the woods.

“I’m not exactly sure how I feel about it,” Clark says about the emo label. “I’m not 100 percent apprehensive about it because, whatever, I can see a connection. But that doesn’t seem like the kind of music we’re playing.”

But it hardly matters — not with songs this strong. Clark and his bandmates seem ambitious, too, or at least committed to the idea of not messing up.

“When we started this band, it was based on the idea [of], ‘Let’s make music that we’re really passionate about that feels cathartic, but let’s do this band right,’” Clark says. “From the very beginning, we wanted to do the band correctly with the purpose of being able to get it to as many people as possible and have it be sustainable.”

Doing music full-time would be a boon, too, Clark says. “We all work s****y part-time jobs. I’d rather not if I could one day.”

Yet obstacles emerge on the road to success — and between these band members, there are highways. Both Boissonnault and Patsfall live in Boston now, attending the Berklee School of Music. The band has made it work so far. But with Clark and Edfors traveling regularly to New England for practice and shows, it’s not ideal.

“They’re — not upset, but annoyed with me because I want to finish school. Getting my degree is super important to me,” Boissonnault says. Edfors nudges her about it. “You should drop out. What’s wrong with you?” he says, half joking. But she’s just finished her first semester. “It’s important to me to stay,” she says.

They won’t be separate for long. Edfors says that he and Clark will probably move north this year, to be closer both to their vocalist and the East Haven, Connecticut, scene where Broken World Media and their studio are based.

D.C.’s punk — or pop? — scene would be wise to exploit the band’s proximity while it can.

After its LP drops, the band plans to tour over Berklee’s spring break and book some shows over the summer. After that, who knows?

Northern Virginia still feels like home, says Boissonnault, an Alexandria native. She says the Boston scene feels fake to her, and getting a show there can be a pain — it’s got a million colleges, and everyone’s in a band.

But Makeshift Shelters sounds ready to rise above. Responding to a question about the band’s larger ambitions, Edfors says, “I want to play amphitheaters. I want to play Verizon Center.”

I wasn’t kidding, I reply. “I’m not, either,” Edfors says.

Makeshift Shelters plays with Swings, Soda Bomb and Colorful Kid tonight at the Commune.

So what’s the most essential listening? I cobbled together what I consider a few of the scene’s highlights, from garage purists to unabashed punk rockers.

Mine is a very incomplete list, of course. Numerous other great bands pepper the local scene with all kinds of variations on garage-hued punk: Thee Lolitas, Foul Swoops, The Shirks, The Sniffs, Sunwolf, and surely others. Do you have a favorite local garage-ish band? Drop us a line in the comments.

Teen Liver

House-show veterans Teen Liver play a brand of rock ‘n’ roll that’s more than the sum of its parts—or maybe, more appropriately, less. The band’s cassette-only full-length plays like a surf-rock soundtrack of a CBGB-era punk documentary narrated by Lux Interior. The result is the most purebred garage punk in the city—which, like good writing, looks easier than it really is. Teen Liver plays Comet Ping Pong April 23.

Nice Breeze

Nice Breeze’s rollicking version of surf punk is so infallibly simple and lo-fi, it sounds like it could have been plucked out of a ’60s beach flick and dropped into Soundcloud. Never mind that the lyrics to “Transparency” are about pseudo science; on that track, Nice Breeze’s sound is all saltwater and sunshine. Nice Breeze plays Galaxy Hut March 30.

The Tender Thrill

If you like your garage rock pure, clean and crooning, The Tender Thrill should be in your earbuds. At times, the band can make The Standells and The Sonics sound like fist-in-the-air punks. But at its best—like on “One and Only One” from its self-titled 2012 LP—the band shows up with enough blues and barroom jangle to get the jackets off and the whiskey pouring.

Passing Phases

Without getting into the credentials of pop punk—possibly the most misapplied genre in all rock music—Passing Phases is as pop punk as the D.C. garage-revival scene gets. On its “Endless Autumn” LP, the band laces its sneering vocals and frank lyrics with pop hooks and a near-constant midtempo punk beat that pumps life through the whole record. It’s a beautiful thing. Passing Phases sounds both old and new, in better quantities and ratios than many of their garage-rock contemporaries. It may be the best the city has to offer. Passing Phases plays Comet Ping Pong April 11.

The Doozies

I don’t hear a lot of burger in The Doozies’ “cheeseburger rock,” but I do hear a lot of Bay Area: The Doozies, brothers in fuzzy garage-pop, sound like they should be jamming with The Mantles and Thee Oh Sees. On last year’s “Cooked Out,” they also dropped one of my favorite local rock songs, the hummable “A Doctor,” which you probably would need if you crushed as many cheeseburgers as these dudes probably do. (Ally Schweitzer)

Highway Cross

If there’s a Venn diagram of garage-punk, Highway Cross falls in the punk circle. But I look at D.C.’s scene as a big tent, and even Northern Virginia punk rockers are welcome. On Highway Cross’ two 7-inches, the latest released last April, their tracks walk a line between straight-up punk rock and the kind of early ’80s garage punk that opened the door to a new era of weird punk offshoots, including revivalist rockabilly. “Suspicion Police,” from 2011, is Exhibit A here—it’s a hard-charging, punk swinger with hints of of X-Ray Spex and The Buzzcocks. Highway Cross plays Smash! March 27 and Black Cat April 26.

Crumms

At some point, I’d like someone to explain to me the kinship between underground garage rock and the campy, B-horror movie aesthetic that has pervaded in punk and rockabilly for decades. Not that Crumms are an amalgam of that—the band is not schticky! I repeat, not a schtick!—but it does deliver D.C.’s most faithful take on The Fuzztones’ haunted-house surf punk. There’s also some serious darkness to Crumms’ jangle: On “Obituaries,” from the group’s February demo, the band embarks on a full minute of boogeyman guitar wails before kicking into a minute-and-a-half of speedy surf rock with distorted vocals. Crumms play Smash! March 27 and the Dougout March 29.