Victor Fuertes is a Dominican multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and producer working in alternative rock. He sings in English and plays most of what is on his records himself.

The Bearer of Bad News

His album came out in 2023 after three years of work, most of it through the pandemic, with his bedroom as the studio. He wrote it, played it and produced it.

It runs to ten sung songs and two instrumentals, Figment and Noise. Tired, Broken, Nothing Matters, The Sun Comes Down, Let Me Sleep Little Longer and the eight-minute Numbers For Names are the pieces the Dominican press singled out.

The Dominican reviewer who covered it heard Radiohead, Pink Floyd, Electric Light Orchestra, Nick Drake, Ben Gibbard and Elliott Smith in it, and called it a complex, honest record — which is a great deal for a first album made alone in a bedroom.

Against the grain

The record bets on lyrics and on written feeling at a moment when Dominican music is sold on sound and on whether it moves a dance floor. It covers heartbreak, anxiety, exhaustion, frustration, loneliness and the urge to stop altogether.

Alternative rock in Spanish is already a minority position in the Dominican Republic. Alternative rock in English, made by one person with no band and no label, is very nearly a private act — and it got reviewed at length anyway.

He has kept releasing since, Collateral Damage and Would You Be So Kind? among the newer songs.