Pretty Lights

Fort Collins, a sampler and a bedroom label

Pretty Lights is the work of Derek Vincent Smith, born 25 November 1981 and raised in Fort Collins, Colorado. The project began in the summer of 2004, when Smith started making tracks with Michal Menert, a schoolfriend whose production and instrumental playing shaped the early sound as much as Smith's own. The method was sample-based from the start: fragments of old soul, funk and blues records cut up and rebuilt under hip-hop drum programming, with the breakbeat weight of dubstep arriving later as the audience grew.

The commercial model was unusual and deliberate. Smith founded Pretty Lights Music in 2011 and gave the catalogue away, putting full albums online as free downloads and treating the records as advertising for the room rather than the other way round. That decision turned a Colorado act into a touring proposition that outgrew clubs quickly, and it set a precedent Smith has returned to in 2026.

The records that built the catalogue

The studio run is short for a career this long. Taking Up Your Precious Time arrived in 2006, Filling Up the City Skies in 2008 and Passing by Behind Your Eyes in 2009. Each pushed further from straight crate-digging towards something closer to composition, with Menert's playing folded into the sample beds.

A Color Map of the Sun, released in 2013, remains the pivot. Rather than clear samples, Smith recorded live sessions with session musicians, pressed the results to vinyl, then sampled his own records — an expensive inversion of the usual process that produced a record with the grain of old pressings and none of the licensing. It drew a Grammy nomination for Best Dance/Electronica Album, the only major award recognition the project has had.

After that came a long tail of singles and remixes rather than albums. The last official new music before the silence was 2017's "Rainbows & Waterfalls". Then nothing.

Five years of silence, then April 2023

Smith stopped touring in 2018 after a run of Red Rocks Amphitheatre shows and went effectively dark — no releases, no dates, no public statements, at a point when the project was commercially at its peak. The absence lasted five years.

The return came on 4 April 2023 with the Soundship Spacesystem Tour: 27 dates across nine cities, including Denver, Lake Dillon, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Chicago, Pelham, San Francisco and New Orleans, plus festival slots that autumn including Suwannee Hulaween. Smith's statement was short and framed the gap in terms of health rather than strategy: "I've been looking forward to this day for a long time and am immensely grateful to be healthy and happy and surrounded by amazing people. I feel recharged and more ready than ever to launch a new vision of PL music and live events." Crucially, Menert came back with him, and the live band — rather than a DJ booth — became the default format.

Smith gave the fuller account much later. On 15 September 2026 he sat for a two-and-a-half-hour conversation on the Upful Life Podcast, his first in-depth interview in more than a decade, covering the pressure of the project's rise, substance abuse and medically assisted treatment, the healing work he undertook with his life partner, fatherhood, and reconnecting with Menert.

Forty-five tracks, nine constellations

On 2 July 2026 Smith ended the album drought without a conventional release campaign. A Trip Thru Time Fantastic is a 45-track record recorded between 2017 and 2026 and structured as nine "constellations" of five songs each. The first three constellations — fifteen tracks — appeared at once, hosted on a rebuilt prettylights.com to stream and download for free rather than on the usual streaming services. The remaining constellations are being issued in instalments to land by 25 November 2026, Smith's 45th birthday.

The personnel reads as a live-band record rather than a solo one. Menert plays keys and guitar and contributes production on nearly all of it; Borahm Lee appears on the majority of the first fifteen songs; Alvin Ford Jr. drums, Chris Karns scratches, with Brandon Butler on keys and Scott Flynn on horns. Much of the material is already familiar to the audience: the early constellations include studio versions of songs the band has been playing since the 2023 comeback, plus three tracks previously issued on a 2024 EP.

Smith's own description of the project — "a decade of tunes imagined & chiseled by a family of dreamers" — matches the release pattern. Nothing about it is built for a chart week.

Where things stand, autumn 2026

The 2026 touring year carries a title that tells its own joke about scale: PL Presents: Soundship Space Bus Goes Off the Grid to Cross the Bridge featuring Fantastic Pretty Lights, Prismatic Fleet & The Cosmic Caravan. Tickets went to artist pre-sale on 8 July 2026 and general sale on 10 July. Rather than a long sweep of one-nighters, the shape is three-night stands in mid-sized rooms with festival dates between them.

It opened with a first-ever Capitol Theatre run in Port Chester, New York, on 21–23 August 2026 — an 1,800-capacity theatre, doors at 6.30pm and music at 8pm. Festival slots followed at Secret Dreams in Ohio on 4–6 September, Mempho Music Festival in Memphis on 9 October, and Hulaween at the Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park in Live Oak, Florida, on 24 October.

The centrepiece was Yahn Dawn, Smith's own festival, held for a second year at Meadow Creek in Buena Vista, Colorado, on 18–20 September 2026 at nearly 8,000 feet, expanded from two days to three nights. The main stage was kept deliberately thin — LP Giobbi's Dead House set on Friday, Emancipator on Saturday, Gramatik on Sunday — so that Pretty Lights could play 3 hours 15 minutes each evening, 9 hours 45 minutes across the weekend, tracing the discography era by era under the "A Trip Thru Time" banner. Around it sat the Holographic S.O.I.R.E.E silent disco, more than twenty wellness sessions across the Prismatic Playa and Celestial Sanctuary, and a Horizon 5K on the Saturday with proceeds to the Buena Vista Pride Coalition. Reviewers read it as closer to a residency with a resident community than a festival booking.

What remains of the year is two more three-night stands: The Fillmore in New Orleans on 6–8 November 2026 and the Fox Theater in Oakland on 19–21 November.

The Space Bus rig, and who is on it

The production carries the touring name. The Soundship Space Bus was rebuilt from the Swirl Bridge rig used after the 2023 return, re-engineered to run off-grid, and Smith kept the visuals unannounced until the Capitol Theatre opening. On stage it amounts to analogue synthesisers, keyboards and turntables in front of a large LED screen, with cameras placed around the venue feeding the screen live and a crew of around a dozen running it.

The line-up changed for this cycle. Dave Najarian, who performs as the turntablist 96, has replaced Chris Karns in the live band, which otherwise runs as a five-piece around Smith, Menert, Lee and Ford. Alongside them a five-person "visual band" works from front of house, treating the imagery as a performed part rather than a playback reel — a structure that produced the Capitol run's closing trick, with every performer in LED-lit helmets through a reading of The Beatles' "While My Guitar Gently Weeps".