april the cruelest has been played on NTS in shows including Kraeji w/ Yaeji, featured first on 6 January 2023. Songs played include BRUTALISM.

april the cruelest is the moniker of Fernando “Acero” Rodríguez García, composer, music critic and musicologist from Barcelona. As a self-taught musician, he started his career path in local progressive rock, heavy metal, alt and pop punk acts. He later departed from them as he started his academic education as a musicology researcher at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Along this path, his interest for experimental tendencies grew, which led him to try different composition approaches as he developed his work as a music critic in many written press media like Rock I+D or Mondo Sonoro, where he started being in direct contact with several state-of-the-art Spanish acts like Niño de Elche, Viva Belgrado or Obsidian Kingdom.

april the cruelest is a catalyst of these experiences, which merge in a conceptual approach based on symbolist collages, mixing post tendencies and filtering them through abrasive electronics and industrial sounds. His debut album, hard bop (or how i started hating myself) takes several influences which drift from the deconstructed club of Kai Whiston and Amnesia Scanner to the heavy sludge sounds of Cult of Luna or The Body, along with the trip-hop of Massive Attack, the hybrid urban imagery of Liberato, the digital hardcore of Machine Girl or lo-fi noisy passages inspired by Low, Alessandro Cortini or Have a Nice Life.