The trio’s forthcoming album, Bland In D.C., deals with the big stuff — late capitalism, gun culture, mass complacency — with cynicism and a generous dose of absurdity.

“They’re songs about existing in a consumerist capitalist world, from the perspective of someone who’s trying to get enlightened,” says Mike Andre, the band’s bassist, vocalist and chief songwriter. “Several of them are about money and shopping and accumulating things. Some are about violence or nihilism. And all are about deconstructing the ego identity inherent in these pursuits.”

Album standout “Goths N’ Vandals” brings these ideas into focus. While Andre and drummer Amanda Huron pogo around a two-note riff from guitarist Justin Moyer, the frontman juxtaposes lyrics about destitution in the streets with descriptions of a high-society bacchanalia. An ominous chorus forecasts the collapse of an empire. The message could apply to ancient Rome — or the present day.

As with the rest of Bland In D.C. — out April 1 on Lovitt Records — the song is fast, dissonant and performed in tight unison. Puff Pieces occasionally deviate into free-form chaos — like on the frenzied “Object Accumulation” and “Wondrous Flowers” — and when they do, it hits like a panic attack.

Anxiety permeates the album, though Andre says the band was just aiming for “a kind of whimsical ridiculousness.”

The band’s intentions are certainly evident in the album title, a cheeky nod to D.C. hardcore legends Bad Brains and their early ‘80s anthem, “Banned In D.C.” Puff Pieces take that sentiment of outsider frustration and update it for an era of widespread gentrification.

“Mike was walking to work one bright spring day amongst hordes of eager young professionals when the phrase ‘Bland in D.C.’ first crossed his mind,” says drummer Amanda Huron. “It seemed to perfectly encapsulate how we’ve been feeling about D.C., and being punks in D.C., and being in a band here. And somehow it seemed like a sentiment our fellow travelers would relate to.”

Puff Pieces boast a respectable D.C. punk pedigree, with members logging time in local bands Caution Curves, Antelope, Edie Sedgwick and El Guapo. The trio came together several years ago, originally as a one-off project.

“The stated intention was to record some songs, play five shows and then disband, as Amanda and I were preparing to move to China,” says Andre, 41. “We didn’t move to China, though, and the band is seemingly continuing on, thanks to some sort of blind inertia.”

Puff Pieces performs with Jack On Fire, Nice Breeze and Escape-ism March 19 at Songbyrd Music House.

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.

But J. Robbins, Jawbox’s ex-bandleader and guitarist, seems unimpressed with mythology.

“Making For Your Own Special Sweetheart —” the band’s 1994 major-label debut — “was like going to school, and sometimes it was very hard,” Robbins says. He’d realized the limitations of his guitar-playing. The band didn’t know how to navigate Atlantic Records’ bureaucracy. The record sold meekly, too, by major-label standards. Two years later, they took the lessons they’d learned and channelled them into Jawbox, a triumphant album by any measure. But it mattered little — the LP didn’t sail off the shelves. Come ‘97, Jawbox hung it up.

But Robbins never soured on those two albums, the group’s last of four. In 2009, DeSoto Records — operated by Jawbox bassist Kim Coletta — teamed up with Dischord Records to deliver a remastered version of For Your Own Special Sweetheart. And last week, the labels unleashed a freshened-up take on Jawbox’s swan song. Robbins says there isn’t a vast chasm between the Jawbox of 1996 and this new version.

“There’s so much about [Jawbox] that is like a time capsule,” Robbins says. “Even though there might be things I’d want to change, I think it’s silly to change it. It’s like, ‘No. This is really a record.’ As in, a record of a moment of our band firing on all cylinders creatively.”

It wasn’t always like that, not even with For Your Own Special Sweetheart, says Robbins, now a recording engineer in Baltimore. The band had imperfections, like uneven tempo changes that prompted producer Ted Niceley (who had worked with Fugazi on In On The Kill Taker and Repeater) to bring a metronome to their sessions.

“Luckily we had, like, seven weeks to make the record,” Robbins says.

When it came time for Jawbox to record the album that would be its last, the band members had developed an exacting attention to detail.

“Even when we were writing songs, there would be a tempo in mind and we would get in these heated discussions of whether something should be two BPM faster,” Robbins says. Jawbox had become more critical of its own work than producer John Agnello. (The musician recalls band members shaking their heads disapprovingly after hearing takes in the studio, tutting, “Oh, John. John, John, John. Didn’t you hear where Zach [Barocas] rushed the snare in the fourth bar of the second verse? That’s not cool.”)

Yet Robbins has fond memories of those Jawbox recording sessions. He speaks warmly of Agnello’s inspiring presence and discovered he and his bandmates could record quicker with their newfound maturity and efficiency. As such, the band was able to expand creatively, adding auxiliary percussion, organ and even a saxophone, courtesy of member Bill Barbot. Never mind that Atlantic kept pushing back the album’s timeline.

Robbins calls Jawbox’s placement on the major label and its TAG subsidiary “a cultural accident of timing.”

Now, the musician has nice things to say about the way music is released in 2015. He appreciates the Bandcamp model — which he used to release an EP last year — because it obliterates some of the excesses of superstardom that still prevail in music culture. For the Jawbox reissue, he wanted no bloat, no glitter.

The changes on Jawbox 2.0 are subtle, at most. It has updated artwork — a slight variation on the unsettling original, a photo of two fingers pointed toward a bowed head. (Jason Farrell — of Swiz and Bluetip — had to redo the cover because the band no longer has the original files.) Other than that, the only difference between 1996 Jawbox and the 15 songs reissued last week — Tori Amos cover included (stream below) — is a remastering courtesy of frequent Robbins collaborator Dan Coutant.

It’s surprising to hear, coming from a studio jockey, but Robbins says he couldn’t bear to do the job himself.

“Mastering gives me hives,” he says.

Jawbox’s self-titled album is available on vinyl, CD and digital formats through Dischord Records.