“It was about the dissonance of knowing somebody’s online persona and knowing them in real life,” says Jesse Paller, the brains behind June Gloom. “When you see how developed and curated somebody’s online persona is, it sort of comes at the expense of what they’re really like.”

Paller wrote the track about two years ago, when this phenomenon was less commonplace than it is now.

“I don’t even think about this stuff pretty much anymore because I feel like that concern has totally blown out,” says Paller, 23. “Everybody has an online persona and it’s just part of life, I guess. But at the time it was kind of jarring for me.”

Coming of age in a time when people are more likely to meet on social media before they rendezvous in person inspired Paller, too.

“I think it has something to do with transitioning from high school to college,” the songwriter says, “and getting all the friends I’ve known for my whole life replaced with people who I just met and didn’t think were interesting but had crazy Facebook presences.”

“URL” — from June Gloom’s forthcoming album, Fake Problems — swells and dips, with enveloping guitars and Paller’s slightly bummed-out intonation. An L.A native, Paller felt drawn to the twang and reverb of surf music, but the musician puts his own moody spin on it. He calls his style “sad surf.” It’s about “being chill but also being sad,” he says with a laugh.

While this song in particular was inspired by the band Speedy Ortiz, he credits another gloomy songwriter for helping him find his style: the late Elliott Smith.

“It’s impossible to shake Elliott Smith out of my songwriting at this point,” Paller says. “I just gave so many years of my life away listening to [him].”

Fittingly, the band name is stolen from a weather phenomenon that is a total bummer — a sheet of drowsy fog that seems to hang around the L.A. region for weeks in late spring and early summer.

“In high school it always got me — we were so excited to finally be done with school and then there’s a few weeks of just fog,” Paller says. “Which doesn’t make any sense, because the rest of the year is sunny.”

The musician remembers being home in Southern California for summer breaks and feeling morose — from fresh heartbreak, weird weather, the works — and going for drives. Those drives were beautiful, encompassing both beaches and mountains. Paller says his music is made for similar excursions: “That’s the ideal listening situation, I think.”

While there isn’t exactly a comparable scenic drive here in the mid-Atlantic, Paller says his “sad surf” could have a transporting effect. “Hopefully the music can take you there,” he says.

June Gloom’s Fake Problems is out July 15 on Funeral Sounds. June Gloom plays June 24 at Kokomo and July 20 at Songbyrd.

“It’s sort of a meta-reflection on what it means to lose something that you thought was yours, the thing that makes you whole or your masculinity complete,” says multi-instrumentalist Austin Gallas, 26. “Because an obelisk is essentially just a big c**k in the air.”

But as playful as it may be, “Luxor Obelisk” broaches a serious issue in many relationships: an imbalance of power.

“It’s really a love story, exploring what it means to have feelings of possession and ownership over someone, and sort of taking a jab at male possessiveness,” says Gallas, who lives in D.C.’s Columbia Heights neighborhood.

The song showcases the contributions of Gallas and collaborators Erik Sleight (also of Stronger Sex and Br’er) and Ben Schurr (Br’er, Pree) in equal measure.

“Ben has done a lot of really rough industrial noise stuff on it, and Erik was really into crafting a lot of cool fancy synth parts,” Gallas says. “Then I sort of arranged the song and did the vocals, but I think it’s a good all-around display of what we’re up to.”

What they’re up to is using odd instrumentation — like a mandolin played through a series of pedals — to create a blend of deep swooning drones and sparkling synths, hiding a driving dance beat that detonates halfway through the track.

“[The song] really builds up and then eventually explodes in a way that none of the other songs do,” says Gallas. “It starts in one way and then it totally turns into something else halfway through and kind of lets loose.”

Because of the song’s dynamics, Gallas points out that it’s one of their most fun tracks to perform live.

“It allows us to be a bit experimental with the structure,” Gallas says. “It’s not too confined to the logic of the song, so we have a lot of fun with it live. It really gets big and juicy.”

CrushnPain plays May 19 at The Commune.

Lary Hoffman of Aerialist

The 41-year-old resident of Falls Church has used the moniker Aerialist since 1997 for his eclectic instrumental output. When he’s not making music, he and his wife Erica are running two Virginia bars with a spacey motif: Galaxy Hut and Spacebar.

Aerialist has more in common with the shifting moods of a film score than a band with a clear-cut sound. Moon Patrol, Aerialist’s latest album, features sentimental melodies, aggressive riffs, gloomy ballads and beyond, all created with a rich palette of natural and synthesized tones that hark back to space-age eccentrics like Wendy Carlos and David Axelrod.

If Moon Patrol sounds out of this world, it’s intentional. According to Hoffman, the album is inspired by footage taken by the NASA New Horizons and Cassini space probes. He named the album’s songs after the various moons within our solar system.

“There were a lot of crucial moon encounters during this time period, and the moons had great names,” Hoffman says.

Moon Patrol collects Hoffman’s first set of Aerialist tracks since 2001, when a computer crash forced him to put his work on hold. After that, a busy life and career made it hard to rebound.

“For the majority of 2001 to 2014 I didn’t play music at all,” Hoffman says. At one point he attempted a “more rock” version of the project with a live drummer, but the lineup didn’t release any recordings. Hoffman finally returned to Aerialist last year.

“I started tediously composing music with a phone app,” Hoffman says. Then he upgraded to Ableton Live. Moon Patrol highlights this work as well as several updated versions of his songs from the ’90s.

Hoffman plans to blast off with more Aerialist material in 2016.

Recommended tracks: “Hydra,” “Triton,” “Thalassa” and “Proteus”

But the frightening experience fueled him creatively, prompting him to release a string of candid EPs centered on material and personal loss.

The latest in the series, called I Can’t Replace Me, Pt. 2: Develop, finds the forthright MC going deep and broad at the same time, tackling a range of subjects including racism, politics and — on Track No. 2 — the power wielded by charismatic liars.

The song is called “Jordan Chase,” named after a villain on Showtime TV series Dexter (listen below). On the show, Chase maintains a charming exterior while privately ordering his followers to commit hideous acts of violence. Ardamus sees the character as an archetype for many off-screen strongmen.

“I thought Jordan Chase was one of those get-away-with-it types of people,” says the hip-hop artist, whose real name is Artemis Thompson. “He had power and he controlled masses of people. I thought that was a powerful statement.”

On “Jordan Chase,” Ardamus and L.A. rapper Chee Malabar’s wry observations are punctuated by the frenetic scratching of D.C. turntablist DJ Orbit 122. Meanwhile, Virginia Beach producer Vintage buttresses the dark lyrics with a sauntering funk beat that wouldn’t sound out of place on a gritty police procedural.

The third chapter in Ardamus’ “Replace” series, which began in 2014 with Before I Replace You, ratchets up the intensity and clarity of his message. Though the artist says he recorded all of the projects at once.

“I am one of those music nerds who wants albums, not mixtapes with a ton of tracks on it,” Ardamus says. Originally, the series was going to be a single jumbo release with 20 or more tracks. He thanks his label, Delegation Music, for advising him to take it down a notch.

Though Ardamus still keeps his nose to the grindstone. When he’s not working on the “Replace” series, he occupies himself with a long list of local projects, including experimental rap act DropLockers, funk band The Lucky So & Sos and D.C. hip-hop supergroup FAR EXP.

Next year, Ardamus plans to release the fourth and final installment in his series. He’s calling it After I Replace You.

Ardamus performs with The Lucky So & Sos Nov. 12 at Flash and solo Dec. 12 at Science Club.

Warning: Explicit lyrics.

Home World

As the song moves from polyrhythms to luminous ambient tones, it resembles a soundtrack to footage of an alien landscape. But Mullinax, 37, places his inspiration closer to Earth.

“A few years ago, my wife and I visited some friends in Oregon and they took us to see the famed Octopus Tree on the coast,” writes the composer and music instructor in an email. “It must’ve made an impression on me because I kept it in my head for a while, and knew one day I was going to use that name for something.”

“Octopus Tree” (listen below) is the first song recorded for Home World, Mullinax’s latest album and his first release under his real name. After two decades recording and performing as Pilesar, he decided it was time for a change.

“Pilesar had all this history and baggage associated with it,” Mullinax writes. “I wanted to free myself from all of that, so dropping the name seemed like the best way to go about it. In a way, it was like taking off a mask. I had the freedom to become the musician that I’ve always wanted to be.”

The change let Mullinax tighten his approach to music, too. “I noticed a lot of my earlier records were all over the map aesthetically, so I wanted to try to rein things in and focus on creating a mood or an idea that could sustain a whole album,” he writes.

The musician released Home World in August, posting it as a free download on Bandcamp. Now the prolific artist says he’s already working on his next few albums, some of which he plans to release in early 2016.

As trippy as Home World is, it’s not Mullinax’s most mind-expanding project. That would be his Music Discovery Lab, which he describes as “a workshop for kids, teens and adults that helps them explore the artistic potential of all sound.”

Mullinax wants to turn the Music Discovery Lab into a career.

“My goal is to make it a full-time job one day, going around to schools, throwing a bunch of toys on the floor and making a racket with all the kids,” he writes. “It’s a blast.”

A highlight from Khepri’s recent Lottery Pick mixtape, “Jurassic” finds the MC taking cues from Eminem, Lil Wayne and Big Sean as she playfully — but ferociously — boasts about her growing claims to fame. That same boastfulness earned the native of Fort Washington, Maryland, a certain reputation during high school.

“I thought freestyling was [just] battle rap,” Khepri, 22, says in a phone call. “So it always sounded like I was coming for somebody. I [once] snatched someone’s bandana off in the middle of one of my lines.”

Eventually, Khepri learned freestyling wasn’t just battling. From there, she began to make songs “more about everything,” catching the eye of manager Lady Redz.

But Lottery Pick, released in July, isn’t Khepri’s only dinosaur-sized enterprise. Now a resident of Atlanta, she’s also venturing into acting, appearing in a suggestive Mountain Dew commercial that a Georgia-based director submitted to the brand’s creative director.

You’d think that between Lottery Pick, modeling and acting, Khepri would have her hands full. But the rapper/actor already has more projects in the works: an upcoming tour, plus her own racing-game app — which she hopes to eventually push to all mobile platforms.

“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.”

Clones of Clones’ latest single, “Somebody Else” — released last Tuesday and already soaking up thousands of plays — sounds true to form for the band, but with a decidedly sunnier temperament than earlier titular single “Monster Heart.”

The playful lyricism on “Somebody Else” serves as a distraction from the cheerless subtext.

“That’s how I deal with sad things sometimes,” says lead singer Ben Payes. “No one wants to delve into complete sadness when sad times are approaching.”

If you think Clones of Clones actually sounds like a clone of some other band you can’t seem to put a finger on — well, the group is OK with that.

“Good music is rooted in something familiar and comfortable,” Payes is quoted as saying on the band’s press site. Clearly, thousands of others agree.

Clones of Clones plays Aug. 28 at IOTA Club and Café.

“The sounds they used in their beats inspired me,” the Southern Maryland producer writes in an email. “The swing, the synths, the funk-influenced grooves and bounce was amazing to me.”

He’s talking about G-funk, the dominant sound of West Coast hip-hop in the ’90s, popularized by artists like Dr. Dre and DJ Quik. But Judah says it was another producer — Battlecat — who turned him on to the California vibe of that time.

“[Battlecat] made me really appreciate the Cali sound,” writes Judah, 36. “[He] was a beast and produced for all the Cali greats.”

So while working with a few artists on the West Coast between 2000 and 2005, Judah made a string of California instrumentals that sound like the work of Battlecat. He released them this week on a collection called Trips to California (Instrumentals), right in time for Straight Outta Compton — the new box office-busting film about the rise of Los Angeles hip-hop group N.W.A. — and Dr. Dre’s new record.

“I had a 100 gigs worth of stuff on this hard drive labeled ‘Cali,'” Judah writes. “The light bulb went off: Hey, Straight Outta Compton coming out and Dre got an album out… Might as well let these beats fly.”

The track “L.A. Riots” (listen below), which Judah laced with news reports from the 1992 Rodney King uprising, captures a bleakness that felt central to L.A. gangster rap.

“Their beats also had a sinister sound to it and [I] think that was inspired by their environment and gang scene,” Judah writes.

The producer built his California tracks with an Akai MPC 2000CL, an MPC60 and a Yamaha Motif — gear he says is “obsolete these days.” It resulted in a work that feels like a time capsule.

Besides Trips to California, Judah says he has other music in the works, like “some concept albums I been sitting on.” He recently wrapped projects with Kelly Rowland of Destiny’s Child, Rita Ora and D.C.-area hip-hop artist RAtheMC. But he’s still independent, he says.

“[I’m] keeping it indie and creating my own economy and projects that eventually generate money,” Judah writes.

Not that Trips to California promises to be a cash cow. Judah put the tunes on Bandcamp, where they can be purchased or streamed for free.

Photo by Flickr user Doc Searls used under a Creative Commons license.

Composed by Jordyn Stubblefield, the beat feels light and atmospheric, and singers Emmanuel Kerry and Jaquay Smith call for creative freedom. The song speaks to pain, but implores listeners to not become consumed by it.

“It’s about finding joy in wherever you are,” says Bowie resident Haydn Smith (Jaquay’s brother), a producer and singer with Pilate — who, along with Stubblefield, tends to wear a mask in band photos. “It’s about being in that struggle, and trying to find a way out of it.”

“1000 Leagues” (listen below) is the first single from Pilate’s forthcoming EP, Like Gold, expected out Thanksgiving Day. The instrumental was created at least six years ago and was the last song completed for the project.

Smith, 28, says the group calls its message-driven blend of soul “trap gospel.” (It’s already a controversial descriptor in the gospel world.)

Citing OutKast, Goodie Mob and Nas as inspiration, the crew puts socially conscious lyrics on top of electronic trap beats: EP cut “Area 51” details America at war. “Runway,” Smith says, is an upbeat dance number about a womanizer who finds joy in the pursuit. But above all, Smith hopes that the EP can bring peace to its listeners.

“You have to learn to be happy with nothing,” Smith says. “Everything is a process, and everything is a learning experience.”

Warning: Explicit lyrics.