Standout Track: No. 4, “Resume Power,” from D.C.’s Jail Solidarity. The trio’s powerful debut recording, Any Space, Whatever, is a four-song cassette/digital EP that’s 25 minutes of sludgy doom. On “Resume Power,” about the Fukushima disaster in Japan, the guitars start clean before exploding in the chorus as drummer Kristin Eliason, 29, and guitarist and ex-Body Cop member Jason Lobe, also 29, scream the song’s title. “TEPCO, a major nuclear power company in Japan, was putting a lot of pressure on the plant to reopen so that the economy didn’t take as big of a hit after the disaster,” the band writes collectively via email. “So you saw a lot of working-class citizens—particularly farmers—going back to work way too soon, putting them at great risk.”

Musical Motivation: Lobe and Eliason started playing together in early 2012, during a time when they were listening to a lot of Swans, Neurosis, and Unwound. Bassist Lindsey Porambo (formerly of Mary Christ), 24, joined this year, and at the time she was heavily into Scratch Acid and The Jesus Lizard. The sum of all those parts? Brutality.

Words, Sound, Power: All the songs on Any Space, Whatever, are bludgeons, and not just musically: Jail Solidarity’s lyrics are horror-film haunting. “Our songs are definitely about systems of oppression. The lyrics are overtly political,” the band writes. “The idea of it being cinematic is interesting. We didn’t set out to make it that way, but our music is definitely more us taking a mood and pushing it to its furthest logical conclusion than it is us writing a riff or a melody.”

Listen to “Resume Power” below. Jail Solidarity plays Comet Ping Pong Nov. 13.