was an intensely introspective album fueled by self-hatred, even to the point of suicidality (“Not trying to avoid you, I just forget / You keep untying nooses around my neck,” Cunanan sang on “Didymus”). “Famine” channels the same feeling into the voice of an Earth suffering from climate change and asking to be put out of its misery. 

But as arrives at the end, Cunanan shows a new outlook. On “Death”, he narrates the perspective of a dying person coming to terms with their unavoidable fate: “the ending’s unwanted / but I couldn’t stop it.” Cunanan calls it “the shoegaze one,” and sure enough, the track builds to a cathartic wall of guitars and harmony vocals, a tearful goodbye even after the horrors of “Conquest”, “War”, and “Famine”. “To leave is bittersweet,” Cunanan sings at last. “But I let it come for me.”

“I think I’m in a better place than when I wrote [],” he explains. “It used to be like, ‘I don’t want to be here, and there are a lot of things inherently that make me not want to be here.’ This one is like, ‘Okay, I accept that I’m going.’ And I think that it’s scarier, but also a more weighty feeling, to wait to go. That’s kind of how I feel about it – do I want to go right now? Not really. Could things be better? Yeah, but I think that a life worth living exists.”

Then he laughs.

“I hate how much My Chemical Romance is here. It’s The Patient in . As they kind of march into it, it’s like this solemn acceptance that it’s going to happen.”

As in Ingmar Bergman’s , death itself is the only certainty; whatever comes next is left open-ended, as the song’s long tail fades into silence. Cuni, at least, has something to look forward to after “Death”. The day after the 23 October EP release, they’ll play their first ever set at the Fest in Gainesville, Florida, on a bill stacked with emo peers like Dikembe, Dear Maryanne, and Kerosene Heights, plus genre patriarchs Texas Is the Reason. That said, it comes at what Heagy calls a “really strange” time for emo, as consensus around the sound and its future seems to have broken down.

“It does feel like when we say the word emo, or fifth wave, or whatever emo is right now, everybody’s talking about something different,” says Heagy. “Where my band sits in it, I’m not even sure…it’s almost like the universe; there’s all this dark energy pushing everything further and further away. At a certain point, we were all very close together, and now you’re four-and-a-half-million light years away from me. I’m ever confused by the world of music, but I just feel lucky to still be a part of it and work with great artists like Cuni.”

Cunanan also says that emo doesn’t feel as vital as it did around the release of (“Our age of open tunings and capos is falling,” he jokes). At age 27, he feels existential dread as a new generation starts to show up at local venues like Rhizome and Patchwork (“big jeans” are in style, not the skinny cut of his youth). On the other hand, at least in DC, there’s no “arms race” forcing bands into one competitive lane. At Malcolm X Park, as the sun goes down and the lampstands go on, the stars seem not to have fallen to the earth, and the sky seems not to have vanished like a scroll being rolled up. But then again, given the light pollution, we might not know if they had. If the earth is yet to be remade – if conquest, war, famine, and death still ride – at least prophesies that the age of emo hasn’t ended. Amen and hallelujah to that.