The Christmas lights went dark about two minutes into “24 Hr Drive-Thru.” On a Saturday night in November 2019, D.C. emo duo Origami Angel were celebrating the release of their debut album, Somewhere City, at Planet Slush (a College Park basement venue with cinder block walls), topping a bill packed with local acts such as Commander Salamander and out-of-towners like Stars Hollow. Guitarist Ryland Heagy hit the half-second, Dr. Pepper-fueled solo in the song’s breakdown…
“And then I raised my hand and turned off the lights by accident,” says Jared Cunanan—now the lead singer and rhythm guitarist of local emo band Cuni. “I will claim that. That’s my palm that turned the lights off.”
That night, Cunanan left his fingerprints on a light switch—going on five years later, he’s getting ready to leave a more permanent mark on the scene. Ahead of the independent release of Cuni’s debut album, Prescribed Burn (streaming since Sept. 20), Cunanan and lead guitarist Aaron Millison sat down at a Chinese Korean fusion joint off Dupont Circle, not far from the art gallery where Millison works by day, to reminisce and meditate on the state of emo in D.C.
Originally short for “emotional hardcore,” emo developed as an introspective offshoot of the District’s legendary punk scene in the 1980s, pioneered by pre-Fugazi bands like Rites of Spring and Embrace. Across generations of bands, the genre assimilated the technicality of math rock and the melodicism of pop punk. Prescribed Burn is as much a personal statement as it is a tribute to the enduring power of emo in the sound’s hometown, and, for Cuni, it all started at that basement show.
“It was one of the coolest nights of my life,” says Cunanan. “Like, ‘Oh, I wanna do this. I wanna play in bands.’”
At 25, Cunanan calls himself “the world’s latest bloomer.” Growing up in Gaithersburg, he took piano lessons from age 7 until high school graduation; he even went through the customary pop-punk phase as a teen, getting into Paramore, Panic! at the Disco, and My Chemical Romance (he shows up to the interview sporting the official MCR “Boy Zone” shirt, designed to look like a Tiger Beat cover). Even so, he didn’t pick up a guitar and start writing his own music until 2018, when he was studying at the University of Maryland. He latched onto both the raw, expressive lyricism of emo, and, in finger tapping—particularly as performed by Yvette Young of Bay Area band Covet—he found his instrumental entry point on guitar.
“’Cause Yvette Young is also an Asian person playing this music that is [typically] a lot of angsty White guys,” says Cunanan. “But also, she plays guitar like it’s a piano, and I related to that a lot. I didn’t even know you could play guitar like that.”
Channel that inspiration through online production tutorials from Steve Lacy and Kenny Beats, and you get the debut Cuni EP, Saturn, released in 2020 as a Cunanan solo project. It’s emo by way of post-punk and bedroom pop, featuring hushed vocals over programmed drums and fluttering fretboard workouts. After graduating in 2021, he teamed up with childhood friend and bassist Franklin Parada, and the two started performing as a duo accompanied by backing tracks.
“He also went to UMD and was the only bassist I knew, because I didn’t talk to other musicians,” says Cunanan. “Because I’ve known him forever, it felt very natural … Cuni is the first band I’ve [been] in, and it kinda seemed like, ‘Yeah, I need him to be the one that’s beside me while I do all this weird stuff.’”
At their second-ever gig—opening for Walter, Etc. and Leisure Sport at Pie Shop—they met Millison, a guitarist with the chops to match Cuni’s ambition. Millison was raised on Rush, and as a veteran of high school jazz band and Silver Spring’s School of Rock, he brought ensemble experience. He could play in open guitar tunings and tap, and he saw emo as a musical trojan horse: When your choruses are as personal and cathartic as emo’s tend to be, you can get away with playing in time signatures and song structures usually reserved for prog rock songs about elves.
“Emo always seemed like a way to make things that were unattainable more attainable,” says Millison. “Being able to play music that’s full of emotion, full of technicality, full of things that I hold dear, but it’s [also] easy, and people can relate to it. People can understand it.”
Sure enough, you might miss the structural flourishes of Prescribed Burn for the sheer post-hardcore force of it. The addition of Millison and drummer Lucas Kirby made Cuni louder, faster, and angrier; the volume of the full band and the shared adrenaline of performing as a quartet pushed Cunanan to scream until the sound of Saturn went up in smoke. The band tests their limits on “Hypocrite,” a conflagration of blast beats and blackgaze howls. The lyrics of Prescribed Burn up the aggression in turn, with an album-length arc that uses the controlled burning of forests as an analogue for self-destruction in the aftermath of a lost friendship.
“You have a friend that you’re really close to, you lose them in the forest, and then you’re really guilty about it,” Cunanan explains. “And the only way to get over it is to burn the entire forest down so there’s nothing to remind you of it … it’s cathartic in the worst way possible.”
Millison points to a stanza from the title track as a summation of the concept and his favorite lyric on the album: “Tell me where the fire should start/ Arson’s a pill to take, not much an art/ Made for therapy and never for fun/ ’Cause I’d rather see smoke than accept what I’ve done.”
Cunanan calls the narrative of Prescribed Burn a “thesis statement to the world”—something he’s deeply proud of having written. Don’t mistake his seriousness for humorlessness, though; the ironic, referential song titles of Saturn may be gone, but no fire burns hot enough to cleanse an emo band of its penchant for inside jokes. The album’s last song, “Riley,” gives a hopeful end to Cuni’s saga of self-immolation, and it closes with a brief piano solo. What inspired that sharp turn? Cunanan lights up with glee at the question, but restrains himself.
“This is before Kendrick Lamar happened, but let’s say a certain Canadian individual had a song that ended on piano,” says Cunanan. “It’s one of his saddest songs, and I thought that was really funny. I wanted a thank you to my piano teacher—my musical history, and it’s good closure. But jokingly, I do say it is a reference to a certain Canadian individual.” He pauses for effect before adding “who is not like us.” That’s as much as he’ll say on the record. (Incidentally, the outro on “Riley” bears a striking resemblance to “Marvin’s Room” by Drake.)
You could think of Prescribed Burn as a photo negative image of Stay Golden, the pop-punk leaning sophomore record from Baltimore’s Combat—produced, as it happens, by Ryland Heagy of Origami Angel. One album’s title refers to self-destruction, the other to self-preservation, though the concepts are hard to distinguish on a line-by-line level.
Both albums also carry a reverence for the DMV as an incubator of emo. Cunanan and Millison reject the framework of waves generally used to organize the genre’s eras, especially when it comes to their own music and the ongoing fifth wave of emo. (Saturn, with its electronic arrangements and homemade aesthetic, fits the bill). Instead, the members of Cuni see themselves as carrying the torch for the past decade’s underrecognized local strain of emo revival.
“Journalists have yet to get to it, but in the late 2010s, there was a huge boom in the DMV,” says Millison. “Bands like Origami Angel, Knope, Courage Mother, Magazine Beach, Commander Salamander—they were holding it down for emo in this area. We’ve come up much later, but I consider ourselves a continuation of that era.”
Is there a cohesive D.C. emo scene these days? Not exactly, they say—Cuni mostly play mixed bills with their friends in adjacent genres like post-emo project Spring Silver and post-hardcore band Ekko Astral (whose guitarist, Liam Hughes, engineered Prescribed Burn at American University). Still, Cuni take every opportunity to hype up the local emo bands of the 2010s who are still around post-pandemic. Earlier this summer, Cunanan says, the band talked Courage Mother into playing their first show in years, and in August, they partnered with Knope for Cuni’s first tour. As they enter their Prescribed Burn era, you could say Cuni are doing their part to keep the fire of D.C. emo alive.
Prescribed Burn is now streaming. Cuni’s album release show starts at 10 p.m. on Sept. 28 at Comet Ping Pong. cometpingpong.com. $18.54.
Cuni plays on Oct. 31 with Keep Your Secrets, Soul Meets Body, stmnts, and Black Locust at the Garage. instagram.com.