The fuzz-rock trio’s third LP — released in the fall and generally well-received by fans and critics — sounds like it could have come out in 1974, with crushing guitar riffs, groovy drums and howling vocals.

That said, bass player and vocalist Clayton Burgess is quick to point out that the band from Herndon, Virginia, isn’t trying to recreate the past.

“It’s not about being retro, it’s not about ripping off Sabbath riffs or replicating anything that happened,” Burgess says. “We have the gift of retrospection — so much to pull from and go forward with — and I don’t want to just rehash the past.”

This approach has led to three records unlike anything else coming from the D.C. area: classic doom-metal noise infused with the energy of ’80s punk and wrapped in the macabre aesthetic of horror flicks.

Burgess notes that the horror influence is much more apparent on early Satan’s Satyrs records, particularly 2012’s Wild Beyond Belief. “In the beginning of the band,” he says, “I think it was kind of the totality of the lyrical content — that was the subject matter — whereas now I just feel like it kind of colors the lyrics, acting as my secret ingredient.”

On “Alucard,” the sixth track on Wild Beyond Belief, Burgess bellows, “Archetype of evil dispatched on city streets / Creep in the cathedral, in a casket sleep / Does the fire in my eyes betray my groovy guise? / Stare a little deeper, you’re hypnotized,” channeling visions and revisions of Bram Stoker’s iconic blood sucker.

But Satan’s Satyrs is not a horror-metal band. “We’re not The Misfits,” Burgess says. “It just comes out because it’s kind of my personality. I tried to write a love song and it ended up being about Dracula.” That doesn’t mean that things are all doom and gloom, either, and Burgess says he wants his lyrics to serve as an escape for his listeners.

“I like a little bit of whimsy and fantasy in my music,” he says. “I don’t want it to be just like a [Ronnie James] Dio record which is purely fantasy, but I want to reflect things that I’ve experienced in my lyrics and then let them take on a new life and paint them with this sort of fantastical palette.”

“I tried to write a love song and it ended up being about Dracula.” — Clayton Burgess of Satan’s Satyrs

In a lot of ways, that approach is the defining trait of Satan’s Satyrs — the music is simply fun to listen to. It’s larger than life, aggressive and a little bit silly, which is refreshing in an era when so many metal acts take themselves too seriously.

“We’re at a stage here where music is so compartmentalized it’s ridiculous,” Burgess says, “and it’s not reaching out to people, it’s reaching out to niches. I want my music to be honest, I want it to have nothing to lose, and hell yeah, I want it to be accessible.”

In a lot of ways, then, Satan’s Satyrs’ sound is a direct reflection of the band’s rise from a solo project to being invited to play the 2013 Roadburn Festival by British doom-metal legends Electric Wizard — with whom Burgess currently plays bass and Satan’s Satyrs has toured — all thanks to an unsolicited demo he sent them in 2010.

“It’s just really cool to know that doing something like that — mailing a demo tape unsolicited has changed my life,” Burgess says. “So life can be a bit mysterious sometimes.”

At least not from 1995 to 2003, when the noisy shoegaze trio was active in and around the college town of Fredericksburg.

Made up of Oliver Ackermann, Paul Baker and John Fedowitz — friends from Stafford Senior High School — Skywave sounded like The Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine. At the time, Baker says, that’s not what locals wanted to hear.

Skywave (via Facebook)

“These days, the hipsters would maybe like us, but in the late ’90s and early 2000s, I felt like we seemed we were from another planet,” emails Baker, 38, who still lives in Fredericksburg.

But 12 years after Skywave went quiet, a fan in São Paolo, Brazil, is giving the band a belated tip of the hat. On June 20, Renato Malizia plans to release a free digital compilation called Got That Feeling: A Tribute to Skywave via his label and website, The Blog That Celebrates Itself.

“I’ve always been a big fan of Skywave from the start,” Malizia writes in an email. He says a friend who understood his taste — he counts the Valentines and Jesus and Mary Chain among his favorite bands — hipped him to Skywave’s 1999 record, Echodrone, after a trip to the U.S. It was “love at first hearing,” Malizia writes.

“We were playing songs with actual melodies and we looked like some skinny wimps, but we were louder and weren’t following some awful, flavor-of-the-month sound.” —Paul Baker, formerly of Skywave

When ex-Skywave members moved on to other bands — Ackermann relocated to Brooklyn and formed A Place to Bury Strangers and Fedowitz and Baker played in Ceremony until Baker left in 2012, starting Static Daydream — Malizia stayed hot on their trail.

In March, Malizia and Baker began chatting on Facebook about a Skywave tribute. The blogger contacted bands from all over the world with personal or stylistic ties to Skywave and commissioned 19 covers for the compilation. Oregon’s The Prids, Brazil’s Lautmusik, England’s Nothing.Existed and Virginia’s Screen Vinyl Image — in addition to A Place To Bury Strangers and Static Daydream — are among the bands chipping in.

In 2003, after years of playing to unappreciative audiences, that level of Skywave fandom seemed unimaginable, Baker writes.

“Sometimes … we’d play at some hipster place and they’d seem to hate us as much as the country or Top 40 sort of venues, because what we were doing wasn’t considered cool at the time,” Baker writes. “We’d play with hardcore, screamo bands, and I think we just blew them away and they didn’t know how to respond. I mean, we were playing songs with actual melodies and we looked like some skinny wimps, but we were louder and weren’t following some awful, flavor-of-the-month sound.”

Malizia says that’s exactly what he loved about Skywave.

“Skywave rescues on their albums that magic, that energy, that dream of making real music without using the marketing or the media,” the blogger writes. He admires that the group seemed to “say ‘f**k you’ to everyone.”

Or maybe it’s that Skywave — with its sound cribbed from the 1980s and early ’90s — was both behind and ahead of its time.

“Back then it seemed like we were playing shows for about five of our friends, which was cool, but it certainly didn’t feel like 10 or 15 years later anybody would remember or care enough to do some kind of tribute. So that’s a pretty amazing feeling,” Baker writes. “I mean, we were trying to do something great back then, but it never really felt like it was happening.”

The Blog That Celebrates Itself plans to release Got That Feeling: A Tribute To Skywave on June 20.

Below, a playlist of highlights from Skywave’s Echodrone and Synthstatic LPs:

Culling from Virginia Traditions — a collection of recordings released by the Blue Ridge Institute at Ferrum College and acquired by the Smithsonian — Bachman assembled an 18-track compilation of traditional Virginia music for Folkways’ new monthly series, “People’s Picks.”

Bachman’s playlist spans British-rooted ballads, prison work songs, piano tunes and shades of the blues, performed by white and African-American Virginia musicians between the 1920s and 1980s. Many of the tunes are steeped in local flavor, like “Sleep On,” performed by singers Lena Thompson, Lucy Scott and Lucy Smith to a soundtrack of crab-packing. Bachman tells its story on Folkways’ website:

This is a particularly interesting regional Virginia recording and one that I’m especially excited about, as I grew up eating a lot of crabs. The song narrative could take place in any number of Eastern Shore or coastal Virginia crab houses around that time. Behind the typical choruses heard on this tune is the sound of crab bodies and legs being cracked and packed into pint and quart containers. This particular recording was made in Northumberland County on the Northern Neck, at the Rappahannock Oyster Company.

Listen to “Sleep On” and the rest of Bachman’s playlist on Folkways’ site or via Spotify, below. (The institution says the playlist will also be available on Rdio and Rhapsody.) You can stream Bachman’s latest record, River, via NPR Music’s First Listen, too.