“We aren’t a band that can say that we’ve been playing since the ’80s,” Nicholson says. “We’re not hardcore punk — we never said that.” But the songwriter and musician — who spent a chunk of his life in the hip-hop trio Opus Akoben — says being from D.C. imparts regional cachet.

“The analogy I always [use] is, say if Kraft cheese needed a new CEO, and a guy from Parma, Italy, got the job,” he says, “people would look at him and say, ‘Oh man, that cat’s from Parma. He knows his cheese.'”

But after the release of Thaylobleu’s debut album, there shouldn’t be any question that the band knows its cheese — rather, its rock ‘n’ roll. Oscars & Jellyfish crackles, with cutting guitars and even sharper social commentary. Musically the record pays homage to ’70s metal, but there’s nothing nostalgic about Nicholson’s lyrics, which tell true, modern-day stories about gentrification and police harassment, among other subjects. (Stream Oscars & Jellyfish right here.)

Earlier this summer, Bandwidth invited Thaylobleu into our studio, hoping to catch a few of the sparks that fly on Oscars & Jellyfish. The band gave us even more than we hoped for. Check out Thaylobleu’s live performances of “Locked” and “Rose in the Briars,” two slashers that flex both the brain and brawn that make D.C. a punk-rock capital, past and present.

Subscribe to Bandwidth’s channel on YouTube, and don’t miss our awesome playlist of every Bandwidth session to date.

Photos by Rhiannon Newman

Oscars — a species of fish native to South America — can be aggressive, says the songwriter and guitarist in D.C. rock band Thaylobleu. Sea creatures wade into an oscar’s territory at their own risk. “It’s pretty straight-ahead,” says Nicholson, 47. “If an oscar’s hungry, it’s gonna bite you.”

Jellyfish, by contrast, are deceptive. “At first blush, [a jellyfish] is kinda soft and squishy,” Nicholson says. “But [if] you rub up against it, it’ll sting you.”

“Oscars & Jellyfish,” the debut album from D.C. rockers Thaylobleu

Nicholson says rippers like Thaylobleu’s “Locked” fall under the “oscar” category. Seemingly gentler songs, like “Amnesiah,” float along like jellyfish, sneakily dangerous. The tracks represent two poles on Thaylobleu’s debut album — called, naturally, Oscars & Jellyfish — out this week.

The record represents a turn in Nicholson’s musical career, which blossomed in the ’90s with D.C. hip-hop group Opus Akoben. The trio did well — it fetched a major-label deal in France and got love in Europe — but Opus split up, dropping its last record in 2002. Nicholson began to reevaluate himself creatively after that. He’d always loved rock music, songwriting and arranging. But he didn’t pursue them seriously until he made a key discovery: some of his hip-hop buddies were listening to rock, too.

“Back in 2010, we all found out that, ‘Hey, I didn’t know you was listening to this, I didn’t know you was into that,'” says Nicholson. He got together with hip-hop heads William “Bill” Vaughn and The Poem-Cees’ Darrell Perry and formed a rock band, rounded out by drummer Joe Hall. (Fifth member DJ Ayce International joined later on.) He called the group Thaylobleu, after Phthalocyanine Blue BN, a deep and calming shade of blue he fell in love with while attending the Corcoran School of Art.

Thaylobleu focuses on songwriting with an emphasis on lyricism — true to Nicholson’s hip-hop background. Storytelling plays a leading role, too. “Locked” tells the true tale of a nasty encounter Nicholson had with police in 2010. Another album highlight, “Too Much” describes Nicholson’s past dalliances with rowdy women. (One lyric: “When she told me that she liked it rough/Didn’t know she meant fisticuffs.”)

“I wouldn’t appreciate where I am now if it hadn’t had been for [the bad matches],” says Nicholson, who’s married these days. “So [‘Too Much’] is about acceptance, about love, and it’s also about the girl who stabbed me in the face with a spoon.” (A true story, he says. After that incident he resolved to never take a date to Ben & Jerry’s.)

The coda on Oscars & Jellyfish, “Welcome to Anacostia” references the gradually gentrifying D.C. neighborhood in which Nicholson grew up and where he still lives and works. “I call Anacostia a village, and I’m watching it get sacked,” he says. The track delivers a message to new arrivals: “Just [be] mindful that if you live next door to a person who’s lived there 30 years and they’ve been sitting on their porch and laughing with their friends for the last 30 years,” he says, “don’t f***ing call the police on them.”

Nicholson, who spends his days working at the Anacostia Arts Center and teaching martial arts, says he doesn’t like to squander his time behind the mic. He considers it a blessing. That’s what hard-driving cut “Rose in the Briars” — definitely an oscar, not a jellyfish — is about.

Some of his neighbors in Anacostia “don’t have the privilege to be able to be on the microphone and speak their truth,” Nicholson says. “So when I say [on “Rose in the Briars”] ‘I’m the village crier, I’ll make your ears ring’… it’s about how I’m in a position where I can say something and I don’t take it lightly. There was a time that I did — when I was gigging and traveling and hip-hopping and groupies and all that stuff. And I said to myself, ‘If I ever get back to this thing again,’ after Opus broke up, ‘I’m gonna try to use it.'”

Thaylobleu plays an album release show June 16 at Velvet Lounge.

Some of this year’s most unforgettable local songs didn’t come from comfortable experiences. They sounded fed up, and particularly urgent in a year marked by growing inequity at home and multiple slayings by police in places that didn’t feel far away.

In one of the year’s rawest rock songs, Thaylobleu cranked up its guitars to tell a personal story of police harassment. Chain and the Gang and Jack On Fire assailed gentrification with wit and hyperbole. Punk band Priests declared everything right wing. Two remarkable hip-hop works channeled frustration and fatalism among young black Americans: Diamond District’s Oddisee cried, “What’s a black supposed to do — sell some crack and entertain?”, while Virginia MC GoldLink rapped about all the glorious things he imagines happening to him — when he dies.

Not that peace and love felt impossible in 2014: In a touching song released two years after his death, Chuck Brown sang of a “beautiful life” enriched by the warmth of community. Promising newcomer Kali Uchis made us kick back with a soulful number steeped in giddy infatuation. Experimentation thrived in D.C. music: Young artists built on the region’s strong punk pedigree and expanded its boundaries. Mary Timony’s band Ex Hex embraced a classic sound and made one of the country’s best rock ‘n’ roll records. Local bands with shorter but distinctive resumes — like Laughing Man, Two Inch Astronaut and Deleted Scenes — sounded better and more creative than ever before. A Sound of Thunder and Gloom reminded us that the D.C. area is still a reliable producer of top-notch metal.

As expected, Bandwidth contributors faced hard choices while making this list of the year’s best local songs, and not only because it’s our first one. Up until deadline, we were still hearing new D.C. songs we wanted to include. But in a place where mounting wealth has created a challenging environment for art, that’s not a problem, really. It’s a testament to a music scene that perseveres despite long odds. —Ally Schweitzer

Warning: Many of these songs contain explicit lyrics.

The singer/guitarist and leader of D.C. rock band Thaylobleu was helping his then-fiancée (now his wife) move from an apartment near 8th and Kennedy streets NW, when he bent over on the sidewalk to clean something off his shoe. He heard tires screech.

“I never even looked up. I just said to myself, y’know, ‘that sounded like a jump-out.’ And then the footsteps were coming closer. I look up, there were two cops that ran right up on me,” Nicholson says. They grabbed him.

“They sit me on the curb, cuff me, never told me why. There was a younger cop and an older cop. The older cop couldn’t wait to tear into me … the younger cop, he just said, ‘you fit the description,’ but he never said of what.”

It turned out that Nicholson’s North Face jacket and then-long dreadlocks were enough to cause a serious case of mistaken identity. He says the officers “paraded me up and down 8th Street while at the same time waiting to get an ID for whoever it was they were looking for,” he says. Eventually they let him go.

The ordeal—specifically being cuffed without an explanation why—caused Nicholson to contact Metro Police Chief Cathy Lanier, congressional Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton and other politicians. He got responses, but no official investigation was mounted.

It all led to an anthem, though: Thaylobleu’s “Locked,” a hard-driving tune that owes its energy to Bad Brains and ’70s metal. “There goes that chicken hawk circling/With that costume jewelry,” Nicholson sings—with the officers as his inspiration—while the main guitar riff by Darrell “DP” Perry punches forward and the rhythm section of Joe Hall (drums) and William Vaughn (bass) stays—yeah—locked.

The chorus—“I got it locked locked locked locked locked!”—is a true fist-pumper, and the second verse pulls away from the original incident to offer a dire warning for society in general: “Smoke em’ if you got em’/Baby, we goin’ out like Pompeii.”

Despite the confrontational tone of the song, Nicholson—who teaches kung fu and tai chi, works in summer-camp programs and also teaches art—says education is his primary goal. At shows he gives out ACLU pamphlets that explain how to handle a situation like his 2010 episode.

“It’s not even just about black folks, and you’re mistaking yourself if you think that it is … basically, just get your mind right, and understand the times that we’re living in,” he says, “because it’s going to get worse before it gets better. If it ever gets better.”

The 1991 graduate of the Corcoran School of Art—who went by Sub-Z in one of D.C.’s first noteworthy hip-hop groups, the jazz-influenced Opus Akoben (with Kokayi and Black Indian, both still active as MCs)—says he’s reached a certain level of acceptance that D.C. has irreversibly changed from the era when U Street was a funk and hip-hop hotbed in the ’90s. (Other members of Thaylobleu are deeply connected to D.C.’s hip-hop history: Perry is one-half of the pioneering Poem-cees, and Hall and Vaughn have been musicians in the scene for years.)

Nicholson had a moment of clarity when playing the Funk Parade festival in May on a big red carpet across the street from the famous Ben’s Chili Bowl. Looking around at the new buildings, “I had to process the idea that the U Street that I knew … it’s a playground, it’s like Disney World. I feel like the developers are the winners.”

The changes are “sad,” he says, but not stifling.

“My friends, we sort of made a collective decision that if we let what U Street in particular has become get in the way of our being creative, then we’ve lost,” Nicholson says. “So the idea is, keep on playing … I use this stuff as material.”

Thaylobleu plays the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage Aug. 23.