“I think I just really like snails, and then that just rhymes,” says Lindsey Jordan, the band’s singer, guitarist and guiding force. “We were originally called ‘Snail Male,’ like m-a-l-e, but we realized that was kinda dumb and didn’t really make any sense, so we just changed it to the regular spelling.”

Snail Mail didn’t have much of a public profile until October 2015, when it played Baltimore’s U+N Fest, but it already has a debut EP, Habit (listen below), released this month on Sister Polygon Records. Jordan is just 17, and she still has one more year left at her high school in Ellicott City, Maryland. Being so young and yet being a regular at local shows has required some flexibility at home.

“It’s kinda weird because I have a really cool mom — I drive my car to D.C. to go to shows and stuff and she’s not really too overbearing or anything,” Jordan says.

Jordan says the songs on Habit are largely about love — and one person in particular, although she won’t specify who — as well as trying to figure herself out. They’re also kind of literal at times — the EP’s penultimate track, “Snail,” is actually about the terrestrial mollusk. Don’t read too far into it, though. There’s probably no biology career in store for Jordan.

“I really wanna say no because this, like, creepy dude came into my forensics class the other day — he was like a forensic anthropologist — and he made me so uncomfortable,” Jordan says. “He had all these bugs in boxes and stuff that he keeps in his basement and was talking about his creepy life as an entomologist and I just don’t want that for myself.”

The band is mostly a solo thing — Jordan writes all the songs. For Habit, she was joined on drums by Shawn Durham, whom she met at a Beach House show in 8th grade, and Ryan Vieria on bass. Ray Brown and Alex Bass, respectively, have succeeded Durham and Vieria.

Jordan says there are advantages to being so young while trying to develop as an artist.

“In a way I almost feel like it’s easier just because I don’t have to actually have real responsibility while trying to balance it,” she says. Then she adds: “It’s gonna get harder.”

Jordan anticipates a full-length album coming pretty soon. Each step forward gets her closer to joining a rich history of D.C. musicians who started young in the punk and indie-rock scenes and stuck with it. Snail Mail already has influential supporters: Habit was was recorded and produced by Jason Sauvage of Coup Sauvage & The Snips and G.J. Jaguar of Priests.

Jordan’s stage persona is still developing, too. She had some chances to work on her craft earlier this month, when Snail Mail did a short East Coast tour.

“We’re just kinda dumb on stage. And usually I lose my wallet and my phone at every show,” she says. “So it’s usually me freaking out and running around and Ray and Alex setting stuff up.”

She’s already learned one thing about having the microphone: Shut up and play.

“I don’t really like to say that much on stage because I really hate long song introductions,” she says. “Like I don’t want to hear it, so I don’t do it myself.”

But Flasher isn’t trying to sound retro. In fact, the group hasn’t settled on a particular vibe yet, says bassist and co-vocalist Danny Saperstein.

Released April 8, Flasher’s debut EP “is exciting because it does feel a little all over the place, a little scattered,” says Saperstein (of Bless and Trouble). “That’s probably a product of us still figuring out our sound.”

This chaos is only sonic. Turns out, Flasher is a kind of fated trio.

“We’ve been best friends for a really long time,” says guitarist Taylor Mulitz (of Priests and Young Trynas). “We all work together, [drummer] Emma [Baker] and I live together.” Plus, “Danny’s at the house a lot,” Baker says.

That closeness translated well to Flasher. “Luckily, all of us have a really easy time doing music with each other, which I think is really kind of rare,” says Mulitz. “There’s just something about doing it naturally and never feeling stressful trying to write a song.”

Why another band, though?

“The two bands that I play in do such different stuff that it fulfills completely different things for me — even though I’m playing the same instrument… it feels completely different,” says Baker, who also plays in Big Hush. “It’s really helped me progress. If I was missing one of them, I wouldn’t be the same drummer that I am.”

While the three have basically been Flasher since the first time Saperstein joined Mulitz and Baker onstage — in August 2015 — the band is an infant at best. That’s made clear by something that, in 2016, seems uncommon.

“Up until a week ago,” Mulitz says, “we had no Internet presence whatsoever.”

Flasher plays April 16 at Bathtub Republic and June 3 at Black Cat. The band’s debut EP is out now on Sister Polygon Records.

“I love playing with my friends and stuff, but after a while it just felt like I didn’t know how to collaborate with other people and still maintain my own voice,” says Spector, 28.

So the Bethesda resident decided it was time to pursue her own thing. She borrowed a name from a Captain Beefheart song and started up Hothead, her journey into slightly terrifying solo territory.

“Hothead is kind of like my biggest fear,” says Spector, who plays guitar, drums and bass. “I can’t hide behind other people, I can’t hide behind the drums or whatever. I have to sing, I have to do everything. It’s been this tremendous boost to my confidence.”

On Hothead’s rangy debut — out soon on D.C. label Sister Polygon — Spector bounces around from hazy garage to borderline country, focusing on somewhat traditional songcraft, in contrast to her earlier, noisier bands.

“I’m really interested in figuring out how to write songs from a really traditional point of view — folk, blues,” Spector says. “I was just like, ‘I want to sit down with an acoustic guitar and play an old-fashioned song.’”

Lyricism doesn’t get short shrift, either, as Spector explores emotional territory she skirted around in previous groups — a direct product of her transformative time in therapy.

“The sound itself I think I’m still figuring out, but ultimately it’s supposed to be a songwriting project… where I really think about the [lyrics] and try to express feelings that I feel or that people I know feel,” the musician says.

The multi-instrumentalist brings her family into the project, too, using cover art inspired by her grandfather — who loved to doodle — and recordings of her grandmothers speaking and playing music. She says the focus on family symbolizes a ruling concept in people’s lives: love.

“Honestly, every single song’s about love,” Spector says. “But a universal kind of love, not some sort of romantic or possessive kind of love.”

Spector admits that she still finds it difficult to take herself seriously in her new solo format. But Hothead’s debut has prompted her to think optimistically.

“I was like, ‘OK, I did that in three months,’” Spector says. “Think what I could do in a year.”

Hothead plays Jan. 8 at CD Cellar Arlington.

The original version of this post said Hothead’s debut arrives Jan. 15. It does not have an official release date yet. The post has been corrected.

“Boom hazard hazard/Fallout comes my way,” Yandel sings, diving directly into meltdown imagery. She follows up with “Boom hazard hazard/I can’t get away.”

“I was thinking about it as a really great metaphor for a relationship falling apart,” says the 29-year-old Shaw resident, who also plays drums (but doesn’t sing) in Priests. “The chorus is obviously an allusion to nuclear meltdown, so thinking about Fukushima and Chernobyl and when the nuclear reactors melt down — how it’s just unexpected and things falling apart.”

The imagery might not be the most original for a rock tune, but the lyrical content of “Boom Hazard,” which is the fourth track on Gauche’s new cassette, Get Away With Gauche (on Priests’ Sister Polygon label), is unusually personal for the band. Its songs normally revolve around macro-level issues — society’s structure, identity politics — but this one doesn’t move much beyond the intimacies of a single relationship.

And the source of the hazard?

“In the world of that song, I was very big. Too big,” Yandel says. “I had a bigger impact than I wanted to. I wanted to get away from my impact.”

All this is not to say, however, that “Boom Hazard” is a standard breakup song. “I am not your mirror/I do not reflect you,” Yandel sings during one of the rapid-fire verses.

“One of the things the song does articulate well is that there is this feeling that I’ve been coming up against a lot that women tend to be these kinds of affirmative mirrors for other people,” says Yandel. “I’m actually a person with my own ideas, not just a thing for you to confirm your own identity.”

Of course, the kind of affirmation that Yandel is talking about isn’t always a bad thing. In fact, she points out that her closest relationship is currently with her bandmates, and particularly fellow vocalist Mary Jane Regalado.

“Mary sees me as the person I see myself to be and affirms that in me, and vice-versa,” Yandel says. “Ironically, the thing that annoys me that men do, I do to Mary and she does to me, but because we’re equals, it feels less exploitative.”

Within “Boom Hazard,” though, toxic self-affirmation is exactly what leads to a meltdown, because both parties crave the feeling of being valued as people.

“I think it has to do a lot with that sense, or becoming a tool for confirming something about the men who want to date me,” Yandel says. “I don’t want to be that. I want to be a being, too.”

“It seems like a useless word to me because if you’re doing a band, aren’t you already doing it yourself?” says D.C. punk vocalist Katie Alice Greer, 26. “It’s a word that has totally lost its meaning, except that it’s a marketing term. It’s marketable to people.”

But “DIY” fits Sister Polygon, the label that Greer and her bandmates in Priests have been running since 2012.

“We just wanted full agency over how our music was coming out,” Greer says.

With Sister Polygon, Priests certainly has that — down to the smallest detail. Greer usually handles the imprint’s publicity; bassist Taylor Mulitz deals with design. Drummer Daniele Daniele (a pseudonym) oversees accounting, which sometimes includes tempering her bandmates’ expensive ideas.

“When the rest of us are like, ‘This is a great idea to print on sparkly, glow-in-the-dark paper,’ Daniele will be like, ‘Beautiful. That’s not possible,’” Greer says.

Priests guitarist G.L. Jaguar (also a pseudonym) handles the process of packaging each release and slipping them in the mail. If buyers find Cyndi Lauper trading cards in their packages, that’s because he found them recently and thought people would really enjoy them. (He also came up with the label’s name. It’s a reference to a song by Sicilian band Silver Bullets.)

This month, Sister Polygon celebrated a milestone of sorts: It put out its 10th release, Pinkwash’s Cancer Money 7-inch. The heavy Philadelphia band is friends with Priests. So is Cigarette, the slocore ensemble from D.C. that has a 7-inch coming out on the label, possibly this year.

But for Greer and Jaguar, running the label isn’t just about supporting their pals — it’s also about finding music that speaks to them, made by people who are just as passionate.

“When we see music and people who are putting in their all, it’s not just bleeding out your guts with your emotions — that’s important, too — but people who are really trying to express something where there is not space or dialogue for already. That is stuff we want to get behind and try to support,” Greer says.

It’s important to Sister Polygon that it picks artists who have some praxis behind their politics. One of the label’s bands, Downtown Boys, includes members involved in advocacy work.

“We’re a very political band and label, to a certain extent,” Greer says.

Yet Sister Polygon seems fueled not just by ideology, but by its own enthusiasm. Running the label is a labor of love that Priests seems more than willing to do.

“Sister Polygon: very stoked,” Jaguar says, improvising a tagline for the label.

Greer agrees. “Probably annoyingly so,” she says, laughing.

Stream Sister Polygon’s label sampler via Soundcloud:

With striking gold-on-purple artwork and a provocative title — both of which nod to ’80s Swans records — “Cancer Money” finds catharsis in head-bashing repetition. Where the band’s debut cassette dealt with Doubek’s mother dying of breast cancer, and found Doubek raging against the medical system in abstract ways, here there is no filter.

Over a squawking, muscle-spazzing riff, Doubek yelps, “Cancer money making you grave,” with a voice somewhere between Daniel Martin-McCormick’s nervous screams for Black Eyes and Nicolas Cage on fire. Arnwine is ruthless with her drumkit, punctuating every riff with a sledgehammer-powered exclamation point and cymbals that shriek like static. The duo closes with two minutes of a single, ugly riff — really, just an open power chord — that becomes an unsettling, wordless mantra, surrounded by eerie ambient noise.

The Cancer Money 7″ is out now on Sister Polygon.

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