Back in the toddler years of D.C.’s hardcore scene, Georgetown venue the Bayou was both loved and loathed.

On one hand, the Bayou was one of precious few D.C. clubs that would host punk bands like The Damned and Bad Brains, who played a now-legendary show at the venue in 1979. But punk kids in particular complained about the Bayou’s security staff, who had a reputation for being less than hospitable.

One of the groups coming up in that era was Youth Brigade, who both formed and broke up in 1981. As young punk kids who felt unwelcome at the Bayou — which closed in 1998 — they had opinions about the club’s bouncers. (As did Ian MacKaye, who called them “a**holes” in 2013 documentary The Bayou: D.C.’s Killer Joint.) So Youth Brigade decided to put those opinions on tape.

Called “Bouncer,” Youth Brigade’s 72-second Bayou diss track was recorded at Inner Ear Studios in Arlington. The song appears on Youth Brigade’s first demo, which MacKaye’s Dischord Records will release for the first time on Nov. 23.

Here’s what Youth Brigade’s Danny Ingram tells Brooklyn Vegan about “Bouncer”:

It’s about our experiences at the Bayou, a D.C. club that often employed locally stationed marines as bouncers/doormen, many of whom had a less than cordial relationship with the punks who attended the shows. The song was written right after the Bad Brains played there. I managed to get into the show, but Nathan’s fake ID was easily spotted and he was given the bum’s rush. Once I was in, I found the staff was their usual belligerent selves — hassling kids who were dancing and jumping about, all the while castigating those who didn’t drink. In those days, righteous indignation often wound up as a song at the very next rehearsal. Such is youth and such was the case with this song.

Listen to “Bouncer” below. Want to bark along? Here are the lyrics:

Bunch of ugly thugs
Await you at the door
Trying to take your drugs
Trying to make a score

You wanna see your favorite act
But you made a mistake
and you can’t come back
If they don’t like your looks,
you don’t get to see the show
Bayou bouncers, f*****g clowns,
really got to go

Got your friend
By his shirt
Trying to make him stand still

Take away
All your gear
And give you s**t
For not buying beer

Don’t be fooled: if you get inside
If you’re a punk, you better hide

But “Walls Closing In,” a standout from Dot Dash’s latest album, Earthquakes & Tidal Waves, is a change of pace. (Listen below.)

“It’s kind of the heaviest song on the record, and probably the heaviest song that this band has ever done,” says guitarist and vocalist Terry Banks, 50, who’s played in Glo-Worm, Tree Fort Angst and St. Christopher in addition to The Saturday People and Julie Ocean. (Dot Dash’s other guitarist, Steve Hansgen, once played in Minor Threat.) “I’m not saying it’s some incredibly visceral thing — music gets a whole lot heavier than that. But for us, it’s pretty heavy.”

By contrast, other album cuts sound almost sweet.

“The song before it [“Tatters“] is a very light, jangly pop song, so I felt like the obvious thing to follow it up with would be the heaviest song on the record,” Banks says. “And it’s not like this cliché of ending the album with the heavy rocker. It’s kind of right in the middle, and maybe it forms a midway point or apex or something like that.”

But despite being heavier than the rest of the album, “Walls Closing In” is undoubtedly the work of Dot Dash — which is to say, it’s a shrink wrap-tight pop song.

As for the song’s lyrics, Banks isn’t getting too bogged down by details. “I don’t feel like any songs that I ever come up with are necessarily specifically about anything,” he says. “They’re kind of arrived at in a sort of instinctive way.”

Rather than moving from one concrete point to another, a lot of Banks’ lyrics tend to be semi-impressionistic, drawing from a stream-of-consciousness writing style. He says that he tends to feel like songs come out of thin air, “but then I’ll realize that that chorus or that phrase sort of relates to some passing thought or some conversation I had.”

But before you try to start ascribing meaning to Banks’ lyrical style, he makes one thing clear: “We have no message, there is no message.” Dot Dash songs are open to interpretation that way.

“The message is whatever you take from it,” Banks says.

Dot Dash plays an album release show at Comet Ping Pong Friday, April 24.