Artscape, America’s biggest free arts festival, has held a special place in Baltimore summers since its inception in 1982. Over the last two decades, though, a secondary tradition has emerged: unofficial sister festivals that celebrate underground music on the same weekend, always sharing the “-scape” suffix.

This year’s festival spin-off is SubScape, which will be held on Artscape weekend from Aug. 2 to Aug. 4. The lineup features mostly Baltimore bands, ranging from punk to metal to experimental music, in free, all-ages shows at both The Crown and Metro Baltimore.

One headliner is the legendary Canadian punk band D.O.A., which formed in 1978 and helped create an early touring circuit for hardcore punk in the ‘80s, as well as their summer tourmates, the Baltimore feminist punk band War On Women. The eclectic bill includes the avant jazz band Microkingdom and the abrasive electronic sounds of DicqBeats, but the focus is primarily on the city’s thriving “heavy music” scene, from punk to metal.

“It’s 50 bands over three days. It took us like five hours, but we actually did the schedule,” said Kim Te, who co-organized the festival with Michael Habif.

The organizers see it as a way to expand the musical range of the weekend’s festivities.

“A lot of the experimental and heavy stuff that we wanted to focus on doesn’t really get into Artscape, and I don’t think of it as any sort of shade,” Habif said.

Starscape, a dance music-oriented festival in 1999, was the first Artscape spinoff, but SubScape is a continuation musically and culturally of Whartscape, which was organized by the influential Wham City collective and garnered national press during its run from 2005 to 2010, and then Scapescape and Ratscape in the 2010s.

Last year, Artscape returned for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic began sidelining music festivals in 2020, but many performances were canceled due to Tropical Storm Ophelia, and no spinoff festivals emerged.

Last year, Habif started to get the ball rolling on what would become SubScape to pick up where Ratscape left off. Andy Phillips, owner of the Harford Road record store Wax Atlas, joined as a co-organizer.

“I started with a very modest proposal to Kim, and as we got more people involved, everyone kind of expanded on the idea to have it grow to this much larger thing,” Habif said. “I was like, ‘We can’t call it Ratscape because we’re not the same people, and it’s gonna be a different vision.’ ”

Habif plays drums in the hardcore band Tripper, and Te plays guitar in the long-running indie rock quartet Natural Velvet. They met over a decade ago when Natural Velvet was getting started and played a show with one of Habif’s previous bands. Te currently works as a talent buyer at The Crown, booking shows at one of Baltimore’s most vital underground venues, which announced last week it will close later this month. Habif in 2019 began Baltimore Showplace, a monthly Tumblr listing of Baltimore concerts, to fill the void left by an earlier site, Showspace.

Natural Velvet, who are releasing their third full-length album in the fall, will perform at SubScape, but Tripper will not.

“I didn’t wanna deal with the stress,” Habif said. “I couldn’t handle that on top of helping run things.”

Still, he relished the opportunity to put personal favorites in front of a big audience.

“Multicult was one of my first choices. They’re so good. They haven’t played Baltimore since the pandemic; they have members living in different states now. So I feel like for me that was the biggest, the most satisfying booking,” Habif said. “Silk Leash, I would say, is probably one of my favorite current bands in Baltimore, but not enough people know about them.”

It makes a certain amount of sense for the city’s more aggressive bands to play in clubs rather than on an outdoor Artscape stage.

“If people are out in public, this yelling and screaming music is a very niche taste. A lot a lot of people don’t want it, they don’t get it, and it’s not pleasant to them.”

SubScape’s free all-ages shows will let some more adventurous Artscape attendees have a chance to sample something different, or even just come inside to enjoy the air conditioning — a marked change from Ratscape, which charged for admission. SubScape raised funds on Indiegogo to help keep the shows free while still paying the bands.

“It’s great for both The Crown and Metro,” Te said, “because it’s a great way to introduce people to the space, introduce people to Baltimore and heavy music in town.”

Mast Year

The Baltimore band Mast Year, who will perform at SubScape, makes noise rock that harkens back to sludgy ‘90s classics by The Jesus Lizard or Shellac. The 9-minute epic “Figure of Speech,” written primarily by drummer Ben Price, is a standout on the band’s second album, “Point of View,” which was released on Grimoire Records in July. But the song has actually been kicking around since before Mast Year began gigging in 2021. “That was the first song that Ben wrote for the band. We called it ‘Ben 1′ for years,” said bassist Darin Tambascio. “Our set was like only 20 minutes, so for him to submit a 10-minute song was like, ‘Oh great, now we have a whole set.’ So we’ve been playing that one since our first show.”

Powerwasher

One of the more original new Baltimore punk bands that will perform this weekend is the quartet Powerwasher, who released their second album, “Everyone Laughs,” in March. The band formed in 2019, but didn’t begin playing shows until 2022 thanks to COVID-19. Their songs veer from complex time signatures on “Landscape Abstract” to twangy pedal steel guitar on “Stoned.” “We’re the Rorschach test of Baltimore punk bands,” one member of Powerwasher said about the band’s unpredictable arrangements and impressionistic lyrics (the band asked to be interviewed and quoted as a group). “It’s like something along the lines of forcing you to look at a painting to refusing to explain what it’s a painting of.”

Blightbeast

One of the newest bands at SubScape is Blightbeast, a metal quintet that began playing shows in 2023 and will release its debut album “Viscera” at the end of August. “It’s kind of a joke, but I tend to refer to us as ‘omni-metal,’ because we kind of take from all different genres. We have elements of power metal, we have black metal, deathcore, black metal vocals. We also do a lot of thrash,” said bassist Tyler Merchant, who looks forward to playing alongside dozens of different kinds of bands this weekend. “Baltimore’s got one of the best music scenes in the country because it’s so varied.”