Pretty Lights

Colorado native Derek Vincent Smith shaped Pretty Lights around a fluid blend of introspective downtempo passages and intricately textured, club-oriented grooves. During his high school years he focused on hip-hop production, then abandoned his freshman studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder to devote himself fully to music. His first Pretty Lights release, the 2006 album Taking Up Your Precious Time, led to live appearances alongside STS9, the Disco Biscuits, and Widespread Panic. Smith maintained a rapid output through the remainder of the decade, delivering the double album Filling Up the City Skies in 2008 and the follow-up full-length Passing by Behind Your Eyes in 2009.

An extensive North American tour in 2010 included sets at Coachella, Ultra, Movement, and Electric Zoo. Smith kept performing through 2011 while also establishing the Pretty Lights Music label, which issued recordings by Michal Menert, Gramatik, and Eliot Lipp. In 2012 he took part in the documentary Re:GENERATION Music Project and started work on Pretty Lights’ fourth album. Eschewing existing samples, he collaborated with longtime drummer Adam Deitch, Soulive’s Eric Krasno, the Harlem Gospel Choir, and musicians from the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the Treme Brass Band to generate original vintage-styled recordings that he later reworked into the project’s signature aesthetic. The resulting 2013 release, the Grammy-nominated A Color Map of the Sun, marked the first Pretty Lights album issued simultaneously in physical and digital formats. The Hidden Shades, an EP compiling remixes and B-sides from those sessions, appeared in 2014. That same year, following several months of songwriting with Rick Rubin in Los Angeles, Smith relocated to New Orleans and assembled the live ensemble Pretty Lights Live. After touring with the group, he issued the single “Only Yesterday” and, in 2017, followed it with “Rainbows & Waterfalls.”