"This is Fugazi?" asked a friend of mine when I played her their new album, The Argument (Dischord). "I mean, it’s great, but I’d never guess it was Fugazi." The long-reigning champions of DC’s punk scene have been together for 13 years, and they could have gone on making Repeater over and over, but then they would have gotten boring and bored. And the cardinal rule of DC punk is: don’t repeat yourself.

The Argument is the best and deepest CD Fugazi have ever made — the most thoughtful, the most sonically varied, the most open to pleasure. High-volume catharsis comes as easily to them as it ever has; Guy Picciotto opening "Full Disclosure" by screaming "I want out I want out I want out" until he can’t scream any more is pretty astonishing. But what they’ve figured out is that they can imply force at least as well as they can express it. The reserved throb of, say, "Nightshop" (Picciotto’s moan squeezing out from behind a filter; acoustic guitars and handclaps occupying the climactic space electric brutality would once have taken up) delivers its ferocious words more effectively than a direct attack would. This also means that The Argument doesn’t sound especially Fugazi-ish — until you focus on the latitude the players give one another, the taut snap of each note, the instrumental ease that comes from well over a decade of working out musical problems in the same room.

And working out problems is exactly what The Argument is about. Its sound is almost never direct or intuitive. Arrangements shift repeatedly, songs sidle away from where they seem to be going, cello and backing vocals pop in where they’re least expected. The argument of the album’s title isn’t a lashing out at an enemy; it’s the product of deep respect among bandmates who aren’t pulling in the same direction but are trying to find a mutually acceptable solution. Their riposte to people who want the old Fugazi back isn’t "go listen to our old records," but "go listen to our new single." "Furniture," released simultaneously with the album, is a song the band have played intermittently since 1988 but had never recorded. It’s not the step forward that The Argument is; in fact, it’s a sort of cousin to their old standard "Waiting Room." But it’s a gesture: Fugazi aren’t flipping the bird to their old-school fans, they’ve just moved on.

The title of the Dismemberment Plan’s splendid new fourth album is an even more direct announcement of the same thing: Change (DeSoto). Like Fugazi, they’re audibly the children of a DC scene that’s older, sadder, and wiser than its hardcore roots. You can hear Jawbox in the articulate roar of their guitar parts, and Shudder To Think in the way Travis Morrison indulges the eccentricities of his singing voice and stomps on the unwritten rules of lyric writing ("Called my dad to check in . . . he says, ‘Common sense is such a scam,’ and I’m like, ‘Dad, whaddya mean?’ "). And you can hear Fugazi in the Plan’s dislocated rhythms, and in the way they’re trying to get away from emo dogma without losing the headlong punk-derived dynamic that they know is where their talent lies.

There’s also a lot here that’s pure Dismemberment Plan, especially the weird jazz chords thrown in everywhere and the artful skirting of confessional-political mode in the lyrics ("Superpowers" slyly suggests that "no one is going to save the world" with the empathetic sensitivity of emo). The discovery they’ve made on Change, though, is what visual artists call negative space: they’re learning how to not play. Even at its most aggressive, the album is full of gaps, pauses, breaths, chords that hang in midair, instruments that hold back for a verse or two. "The Other Side" isn’t just a fast rock song, it’s more or less drum ’n’ bass — the quadruple-speed beat is played live, the guitar parts are just a handful of hovering notes that act like synth textures, and the dart-and-halt bass line produces the time-suspending effect of good dance music.

Change and The Argument aren’t the kind of recordings these bands were making seven years ago. But there are always younger bands for that. Besides, nobody at all was making music like this seven years ago.