Brent de la Cruz

Skateparks first, software second

Brent de la Cruz grew up in San Diego, raised on a cul-de-sac by a single mother, and arrived at music later than most people who end up making it their job. Skateboarding came first. He started at the end of fifth grade, after his mother could no longer get him to basketball games, and his first street deck was an Alien Workshop. Dallas Skatepark and Kennedy Skatepark absorbed the hours. He credits the board with two things that mattered afterwards: an early habit of independence, and a constant supply of other people's records, heard second-hand off other skaters.

The production knowledge came from a neighbour, who sat him down with FL Studio. Everything he made for years after that was assembled inside a computer. By his own telling the pull towards music properly took hold around the summer before his final year of school. He went to San Diego State University and left without finishing, and that decision is the hinge most of the interviews return to. He was 26 when he spoke to the Vanderbilt Hustler in February 2025; he did not grow up in a musical household, and says so plainly rather than dressing it up as a discovery narrative.

Five years before the guitar

The first single, "Crazy", came out in May 2019. A handful of self-released tracks followed, and two of them — "Fell in Love" and "Far Away" — were picked up by Spotify's Anti-Pop and Lorem playlists, which at that point was the whole of his distribution strategy. Finding Boo, from 2021, is described variously in interviews as a debut album and a debut EP; it carried "Perfect". Then the release schedule thinned out for a couple of years, broken by "Soft Words" and "Save Your Breath" in 2023. He has been unguarded about why. "Finishing songs, that's a tough one," he told Strike Magazines. "It's easy for me to start ideas."

The guitar is the dividing line in the catalogue. "I didn't learn to play the guitar for the first five years of making music," he has said, and by the time of the "Soft Words" cycle the framing had changed: "I can actually play the guitar now. I'm coming up on close to five years." Writing moved out of the software and into the living room, and on at least one occasion onto a rooftop, on the theory that changing where he sat would change what came out. The method he describes is additive then subtractive — over-produce, then strip back until only the load-bearing parts remain. He cites Rick Rubin's thinking on it: find the fundamental things that make the song what it is, and if it still works when it is that sparse, stop adding.

The visuals run on the same economics. Tyler Eastlick, a friend from middle and high school, directs and shoots with him; the "Soft Words" video was made by a crew of two and released on 20 November 2024, shot largely for free. De la Cruz writes, produces, directs and edits, which is less a stated philosophy than a description of who is available.

BLANC, NOIR and the record that joined them

2025 is when the catalogue stopped being sparse. "Streets" opened the year on 3 January. The NOIR EP followed on 7 February, built around transportation and nostalgia — themes he says came out of what he had actually been doing rather than a concept decided in advance — and it had gathered close to two million collective streams by the summer. "Smithereens" arrived in May, trailing a second EP, BLANC. AnalogueTrash, writing on 18 May, described chilled brass, an organ with genuine analogue character and a blue-eyed-soul vocal that lulls the listener into a false sense of security before the closing lyric lands.

"Day To Day" came in the first days of July, three and a half minutes of flat, reverb-soaked vocal over distorted indie-rock guitar and a pop beat. EARMILK heard Dominic Fike at the edges of it; Melodic Magazine heard Frank Ocean and MGMT, and traced the song back to skating through San Diego streets as a kid. He said almost all of it landed at once: "Day To Day was one of those songs that pretty much wrote itself. 99% of it was written, produced, and tracked in just a few hours."

RENDEZVOUS, 1998. followed on 29 August 2025: twelve tracks, BLANC and NOIR resequenced into a single arc rather than reissued back to back. The organising idea is that the light and the dark halves depend on each other — "one cannot exist without the other" — and the subject matter is mental health, accountability and getting back in contact with himself. A trip to Japan feeds into it; he puts the lift down to attention rather than scenery, saying the music "felt so much more alive, maybe because I was being more present". Aphex Twin, Empire of the Sun and MGMT turn up as reference points, though he is more interested in holding an emotion than in holding a genre.

Where he stands in October 2026

The largest piece of distribution his music has had is a sync. "Save Your Breath", the 2023 single, sits on the official EA Sports FC 26 soundtrack, filed under indie pop among 108 tracks — a placement that puts the song in front of a football audience that will mostly never learn whose it is. He had only found out about it two days before his Q&A with The Luna Collective on 3 October, which is a fair measure of how the business reaches him: late, and sideways.

No label is named in any of the published interviews. The press is trade and student press — Washington Square News on 10 February 2025, the Vanderbilt Hustler on 24 February, Strike, EARMILK, Melodic, AnalogueTrash, POPTIZED, Luna Collective — all of it well-disposed and none of it from an outlet that moves ticket sales. There has been no major-title review of a record. In the October Q&A he talked about rehearsals and performances ahead, which is the first time touring has figured in his conversation at all.

One date, one small room

What is actually on sale is a single show: Friday 23 October 2026 at The Moroccan Lounge, 901 East 1st Street in the Los Angeles Arts District, 6.30pm, co-billed with Mei Jun and promoted by +1 Presents. Eighteen dollars in advance, eighteen on the door, all ages. The listing does not say who closes. Live Nation carries nothing else for him, so this is not a leg of anything — it is one night in a small room in the city he and Eastlick now work out of.

It is worth being straight about what cannot be verified. No published review of a Brent de la Cruz set exists, so the length of the show, the shape of the setlist and the size of the band are not on the record. What can be said is that the material was deliberately rebuilt around live instrumentation and played parts rather than programmed ones, which points towards a band on stage rather than a laptop, and that the records he will be drawing from — NOIR, BLANC and the album that merged them — run to roughly an hour of finished music in total.