Music
Cuco on the Rise
Omar Banos is an indie-pop prodigy on the verge of mainstream fame, but last October, his career hung in the balance after a semi-trailer crashed into his tour van. Here's the story of his comeback.
Now, freshly signed with a major label, the 20-year old artist is back with a new sound and a new appreciation for what matters.
Bathed in a magenta glow, Cuco fidgeted with his guitar. Clad in a baggy striped polo, snapback pulled low to obscure his eyes, he was nervous, even though he’d spent the last two years performing on stages across multiple continents. Even though he was now back on home turf, the Hi Hat in Los Angeles’s Highland Park neighborhood, where he’d played his first-ever venue show. And even though the 50-member audience was entirely composed of friends and familiar faces, who’d come out on this Tuesday afternoon in late January to support him and his four bandmates.
“This is the most people I’ve ever known compiled into one place,” he muttered sheepishly into the microphone by way of a greeting.
Through his signature emotional lyrics and dreamy DIY production, at age 20 he’s already gained the respect and admiration of the indie-pop scene and captured the hearts of seemingly every Latina teenager in the Southland (and beyond). And he had just signed with Interscope the day before, but that’s not why he was anxious.
“This is our first time since the fucking accident,” he said. “We’re going to play a song that hasn’t come out yet.” Then Cuco launched into a plaintive ballad, one with an instantly catchy, swoon-worthy hook. There was no rock-star posturing from him or his band, but the crowd swayed and waved their illuminated smartphones in unison all the same.
"Tell me that you love me. Tell me that you need me," Cuco crooned confidently, all the nerves seeming to melt away into a solid, sweet falsetto, if just for a moment. "I fell in love again."
Cuco performing at the Hi Hat
© RAMONA ROSALES
Cuco was born Omar Banos in Inglewood, California, to a Chicano family of nonmusicians, although as appreciators of music they exposed young Omar to a diverse array of genres throughout his childhood. Perhaps foreshadowing his future fusion sensibilities as an artist, Cuco grew up immersed in music from the U.S. and U.K., Italy, France, Asia and, of course, Mexico.
His only direct instruction was in guitar, which he began learning when he was 8. Everything else — drums, keys, bass, trumpet, mellophone, French horn (and soon, woodwind instruments) — has been largely self-taught, as was music production, through a cheap MIDI keyboard he bought when he was 15, which came with a stripped-down version of the software Ableton Live. His early Instagram posts document a young artist honing his technique and discovering his style, practicing metal riffs on the guitar and posting snippets of his own work.
The family had moved by then to nearby Hawthorne, where Banos played horns for the Hawthorne High marching band at school and experimented with his own music — and other influences — outside of it. “Mexican music inspired me super heavy,” he says. “And I was into psychedelic rock, but I didn’t start really understanding it until I started trying psychedelics in high school.”
Banos uploaded his covers and originals to Soundcloud under the moniker Heavy Trip, which he later switched to Cuco (Spanish for “cuckoo”), his mother’s nickname for him. “[My songs] were just there,” he says. “I don’t think anybody ever gave a shit, because I didn’t have [many] friends in high school, which was partially why I had so much time to put out all this music.”
Cuco
© RAMONA ROSALES
Drawing inspiration from his favorite artists and albums — Tame Impala’s "Innerspeaker" and "Lonerism" he says “completely reshifted everything I thought I knew about music,” as did Foxygen and Thundercat — and fusing them with the “cholo rap” of his cultural environs (MC Magic, Lil Rob, Baby Bash), Cuco developed his own kind of hazy, Spanglish-spangled sound. “Back then we played a lot of metal and crazy time signature music,” says Esai Salas, one of his best friends from high school. “So when he first showed me a recording of what we now know as the Cuco style, I was very taken aback, in a good way. And before I knew it, he started building a little name for himself on social media.”
By now, Cuco’s origin story is the stuff of 21st-century-indie-star-is-born legend. Days after graduating from high school in June 2016, he posted a melancholy instrumental slide-guitar cover of Santo & Johnny’s 1959 surf-rock hit “Sleep Walk” on Twitter. As fate would have it, those who stumbled across the video noticed that he was wearing merch from Pouya and tagged the Miami hip-hop artist. “Pouya was the first person to fuck with me,” says Cuco. “Even though he didn’t follow me yet, he retweeted it, and a bunch of people retweeted him. That’s how it started. I was at a family party when I started seeing all these retweets and was like, ‘Yo, what the fuck is happening?’”
From there, young underground music lovers, always on the lookout for new discoveries, tracked down Cuco’s original compositions on Soundcloud, where he began building a following beyond Hawthorne. That summer he released a seven-track mixtape, "Wannabewithu," which included “Amor de Siempre” and “Lover Is a Day” (now 14.5 million and 32.2 million plays on Spotify, respectively), whose languid, lo-fi production and wistful lyrics (“Time changed, we’re different/But my mind still says redundant things/Can I not think? Will you love this part of me?”) tapped into an element of the Gen Z imagination, in the prime of youth yet already reminiscing about it. “Not to get super emotional in a depressing way, but I feel like somehow I can bring people familiar feelings where they don’t really know where it comes from,” says Cuco, who describes his music as having “a euphoric, nostalgic vibe.”
He played his first show that September, an appearance at the Just Another Rap Show concert series, in which his name didn’t even appear on the flyer — he was just one of myriad anonymous performers billed as “+more.” But there he was, a crowd huddled around him in the Venice 6114 art space, singing along to every word of “Lover Is a Day.”
Photo booth fun
© Courtesy of Omar Banos
Having found a tribe of like-minded musical misfits, Cuco assembled a band with his “homies,” as he calls them (including Salas on bass), and they played their first show together on October 8, 2016, in the backyard of a house in the southeast L.A. city of Santa Fe Springs. This time, Cuco was the headliner. He dropped a second mixtape, "Songs4u," the following January and continued to play backyards, drawing ever-growing crowds as his music spread.
One person who caught wind of the local phenomenon was Doris Muñoz, then a 23-year-old fledgling music manager and fellow SoCal-bred Mexican American who checked out one of Cuco’s backyard shows in February 2017. “I was in a sea of teenagers singing every lyric to ‘Amor de Siempre,’ which is all in Spanish,” she says. “Here’s this kid making alternative music mixed with bolero, playing a trumpet and he has this band, and they’re all Mexican kids from the hood of Hawthorne. I cried that night when I saw it.”
Muñoz convinced Cuco to become her second-ever client, and she got to work on his career immediately, booking (and selling out) shows at actual venues and setting up meetings with major labels. (Muñoz had him in the Columbia Records offices within four days of hearing him play the February house show.) The following month Cuco sold out his first venue, Muñoz’s Solidarity for Sanctuary benefit for undocumented immigrants, which was attended by industry scouts.
Cuco's return
© RAMONA ROSALES
Carlos Cancela, who works in A&R at Interscope, got his first text about Cuco that night, from a friend who was at that show. “Then I got two other calls that week from people saying, ‘You gotta check this kid out,’ ” he says. “I was blown away. It’s everything I love about music — really psychedelic, really sweet, very honest.” By the end of the week Cuco and Muñoz were sitting in his office, where Cuco and Cancela instantly hit it off musically.
But Cuco held off on jumping to a major (or any) record label right away. “You have to hear everyone out, because not everybody is given this opportunity to be courted like this,” Muñoz advised him. In between being wooed by music execs, Cuco continued to focus on writing and producing his own singles at home — “Lo Que Siento” hit the Internet in May 2017, and at 36.2 million Spotify plays it’s his top track to date — and gigging with his band, all while ostensibly still enrolled at Santa Monica College. “I was ditching classes to go play shows,” he says, which caused understandable friction with his immigrant parents. “They were skeptical, but once they saw that I was actually making money with my music and was serious about it, they were like, ‘All right, you’re good to drop out of college.’ I had already dropped out, so I was relieved they said that.”
With no more pesky classes to tie him down, Cuco quickly graduated from local venues to big cross-country tours. In 2018 he hit the major festival circuit — Coachella, Lollapalooza, Governor’s Ball, Outside Lands, Austin City Limits, SXSW and FYF — and even crossed both ponds, performing in Orléans, London, Hamburg, Jakarta, Singapore and Bangkok. “It’s crazy because these kids are singing back to me in Spanish,” he says, aware of his potential as an ambassador for an entire culture currently under siege. “Just being able to represent [the Latino community] in a more positive light [is a big deal], especially in this political climate, which is super fucked.”
The likes of "Pitchfork" and "Fader" praised his EP "Chiquito," self-released midtour, which Apple Music promoted with giant murals in downtown L.A., Highland Park, Echo Park, Greenpoint and Williamsburg. And by the fall of 2018 he was in final talks to sign a major record deal with Interscope. It appeared that nothing could stop Cuco’s stratospheric ascent — until an incident on the road nearly ended everything before it even started.
The multi-instrumentalist
© RAMONA ROSALES
October 8 is a date permanently etched in Cuco lore. In 2016, it marked the first time he and his bandmates ever played together, a handful of recent high school graduates jamming in a backyard in South L.A. And exactly two years later, on a lonely stretch of Interstate 40 in western Tennessee, it marked the day they almost lost their lives.
Cuco has a hard time talking about what happened. “It’s very anxiety inducing,” he says, expressing that he still experiences PTSD from the accident. “I wake up thinking I’m still there and am going to crash. I hallucinate a lot.”
Salas, his old friend and bassist, is better able to reconstruct the night. The band was in a large passenger van on their way to Nashville, traveling east on the I-40. At around 3 in the morning, the van lost control and tipped over, sliding to a rest in the slow lane. “I was in the last row on the side that flipped and was knocked unconscious, but I woke up to the guitar player screaming, ‘Wake up!’” Salas recalls.
He and the others in the van — 10 in total — scrambled out of the vehicle to huddle on the shoulder, but that was when a semi-trailer suddenly appeared and struck their vehicle, which slammed into Cuco and his crew.
Cuco
© RAMONA ROSALES
“We all kind of went like bowling pins, and that’s how a lot of the major injuries happened,” says Salas, who was knocked out a second time and sustained a concussion, as well as a separated shoulder. Miraculously, everyone survived, but the accident left them physically and emotionally shaken. Muñoz and Cancela flew out to Tennessee that same day, where they found Cuco vacillating between dark moods as a result of his extreme pain — he had surgery to insert 13 screws and a rod into his left leg — and gratitude for being alive.
After a week in the hospital, the band was able to fly home to L.A., but the rest of 2018’s tour dates — which were to include stops in Canada, Chile, Argentina, Ireland, Luxembourg and Spain — were canceled. “Just being in a car was very hard for us in the beginning,” Salas says. “The slightest little bump on the freeway, and you would tense up.”
Muñoz and Cancela were careful not to push Cuco, but he jumped back into music-making of his own volition, eager to keep working on his new album. (He had lost some of his new material when his computer was demolished in the crash.) “He brought his studio back into his bedroom where it all began,” says Muñoz. “I saw him dive into his music and utilize that as his outlet to get through this.”
With recovery and the benefit of a few months’ distance, the parties involved are all now able to see the silver lining in what happened. “[Cuco] was starting to burn out a bit. Now they’re all out of casts and off crutches and in group therapy. It’s beautiful to see a group of brown men do therapy together, to normalize that,” Muñoz says, adding that Cuco has even called the accident a blessing in disguise. “It allowed him the time to create. It allowed him the time to breathe again.”
Cuco with fans
© RAMONA ROSALES
The unplanned respite may be the last that Cuco and his band have for a while. With the Interscope signing, the kid from Hawthorne is about to see his already-impressive career reach even higher heights. “Omar’s done a lot of the groundwork on his own,” says Cancela, citing a mentor’s advice on the two ways to find new talent. “You either ride the coattails of the zeitgeist or you find something that the charts are missing, that the culture doesn’t know it needs. Omar on his own has already stirred something up and become something that people didn’t realize they needed.”
Although he’s still only 20, Cuco’s two years of particularly unique life experiences have shaped him as an artist. “I’m starting to steer away from the regular Cuco shit,” he says, calling it “a concept that’s tight but super easy to mimic.” Of his new material, which will be showcased in the major-label debut due later this year, he’ll only say that the songs are very diverse, his production has gotten “more crisp” and his writing process has matured. (One hint of his new sound might be found in “Fix Me,” the surprise collaboration he dropped on February 6 with electronic producer Dillon Francis.)
He's at the focal point of a movement. First-generation kids are looking to him for inspiration, motivation and representation.
“People like us, who grew up in the environments that we grew up in, had to mature fairly quickly,” says Salas, noting that his friend has adapted well to the responsibilities of his fame. Adds Muñoz, “He’s assuming the position more now. He now understands that he’s at the focal point of a movement, and a lot of first-generation kids are looking to him for inspiration, motivation and representation.”
Clowning around
© RAMONA ROSALES
“I really hate being the center of attention,” says Cuco, who is mystified by his heartthrob status. “I never pulled in high school or college for the fucking year that I was there. It’s out of nowhere. I don’t know what to think about it.”
He adds that he’d like to switch to a producer’s role someday, but for now “the impact means more to me than anything, when I get messages from kids being like, ‘Yo, you helped me through so much,’” he says.
And the support is reciprocal. Back at the Hi Hat that January afternoon, Cuco stood onstage at the end of his first set in nearly four months. “We’re scared to get back on the road,” he admitted to the crowd. “This is a first step for us in getting us back there. It’s been a fucking trip and I appreciate you all for being here.”
