The Dance Party talks leacing D.C. for L.A., 'Touch', and playing strip clubs. (Photo: courtesy of the band)

Tonight,  the Dance Party, the D.C. synthpop group now based in L.A., is back on home turf for a show at 9:30 Club with Wallpaper, K-Flay, and D.C. bands Ra Ra Rasputin and lowercaseletters. It's the first night in a nearly solid month of touring both the east and west coasts.

In 2009, the band moved to L.A. where, after snagging a deal with Hell Ya! Records/Atlantic, it released the full-length album Touch, and set up a monthly residency at Crazy Girls, an L.A. strip club. So, what’s it like coming back to D.C. after experiencing the hedonistic left coast lifestyle?

“It’s still pretty awesome," says Dance Party guitarist Kevin Bayly. " We were lucky enough to have a lot of fans here before we left, and we still have a lot of fans when we come back, but it’s definitely a different vibe. But I think we try to be as fun and engaging as possible, and people who come to the shows get the vibe of the music we’re doing. And if they’re coming to a Dance Party show, they’re there to have fun, as opposed to not having fun. People in D.C. who don’t want to have fun, you probably won’t catch them at the 9:30 Club tonight.”

Although it's always good to come home, Bayly says that not everything the band has done in the past year in L.A. could've happened in D.C.

“I think on the left coast you're allowed to get away with things you couldn’t here," he says. "The concept of doing something in a strip club might not work in D.C. Where would we go? Good Guys? And I don’t know if anyone would even come. Maybe a few friends who would feel sketched out. But out there it was like, ‘Why not?’ And a lot of people came out, which is pretty cool.

"If you're talking about L.A., it's just a way different lifestyle, especially in the entertainment industry," Bayly continues. "It's like, 'It's a Wednesday? So what?' In D.C., if you want to go out on a Wednesday, you've gotta work hard to find somewhere cool. [In L.A.] there's a party every night, it doesn't matter if it's Monday. Most people out there, especially in the record industry, their jobs are more flexible. It's different than working on Capitol Hill and having to wake up and go to a lobbyist job. I'm not putting that down, but it's just different—it's easier there to have a party vibe all the time.

Even while working: Bayly says that while the band put a lot of hard work into Touch, there was definitely a fun, party atmosphere going on during the recording of the album.

"Our intentions were to make a really awesome record, to make it as good as possible," he says. "We made friends, worked really hard, and also partied.  We worked with a lot of great people and great studios, and even though we take everything we do seriously, we're not difficult people to work with. You don’t name your band the Dance Party and not mean it."

Even though the band is across the country, it manages to play in D.C. pretty regularly, and, as with tonight's show, always gets to picks area bands to play with them.

“We’ve played shows in D.C. for so long, clubs trust us and let us pick who we want to have," Bayly says. "Ra Ra [Rasputin] are our good friends, and we think their music is exciting. They were definitely on the short list of bands we wanted to play with us. And lowercaseletters is John Beckham’s project—he has been involved in the D.C. music scene a long time, and the new project is pretty cool so we were like, ‘Come play with us.’

“I wish more D.C. bands would tour more, so we could play with them in other cities, but it doesn’t happen that often," he continues. "That’s my one criticism: I wish some of the really cool bands would just get out, not saying move out of the city, but do it full time. But I know how difficult and how expensive that is—it’s risky.”

Not to mention how easily bands can be forgotten once they leave D.C.: Bayly says he saw the (now fixed) Washington Examiner headline that read: "Ra Ra Rasputin Headlines The Dance Party at 9:30 club," confusing Dance Party with a dance party.

“That’s never happened in D.C. before," he says, laughing. "This is probably the tenth time we’ve played 9:30. Maybe we were gone for too long? It was great piece on Ra Ra, though—there’s no animosity. Someone from Ra Ra sent it to me, and I was like, ‘Are they trying to pit us against each other?” But then I read it and it’s just a good article about Ra Ra.”

“And it is sort of a generic name when it comes to music—Dance Party could mean anything, which is why we went with it," Bayly continues. "We actually didn’t put too much thought into the name. We came up with it when we did a show, like, four years ago, when it was a new project, and someone just said, ‘Hey, you need a name.”