Pretty Lights to release new album in 2017

In late February of this year, Derek Vincent Smith underwent a musical reawakening of sorts. Following a series of cryptic messages posted to the Pretty Lights social media accounts, Smith announced his Episodic Festival tour — the most recent evolution of the perennially updating Pretty Lights live experience. Though Smith’s success during his 2016 tour has pushed him further into the limelight than he’s been for quite some time, he still has been relatively quiet in the past several years, granting few media appearances and approaching the fourth year of a hiatus from releasing original music (excepting his single “Only Yesterday,” from March 2016).

In a rare interview with Denver Post, however Smith has divulged that his musical moratorium is coming to an end. Apparently in 2017, Pretty Lights will release his first album since 2013’s A Color Map of the Sun:

“I’m really excited about what I’m working on. I’ve got an album that’s almost ready. It’s slated for an early 2017 release. It’s not just a music record — I’m actually making a film with it, as well.”

The post noted that the new album/film hybrid may be released on April 20 of next year. The notion of a mixed audio/visual project from Pretty Lights is innately scintillating given his track record for appealing to both sensibilities in innovative ways. In extrapolating upon how he plans to meld the two visions for his forthcoming project, Smith relates his goal to his Episodic Festival tour:

“I’m trying to make a film and a record that’s really about the connection of people — the amazing things that happen between people on the same frequency. It will be an episodic thing that makes a full piece. Every song has an episode. It connects to my episodic music festival. When I was booking that tour, I wanted to call it ‘The Weekend’s Episodic Festivals.’ I didn’t know why I wanted to call it that, but it’s all going together. Every festival, we’d have a film shoot that became the building blocks of these episodic film pieces. It’s pretty (cool).”

Read Smith’s full interview with Denver Post here.

H/T: This Song Is Sick

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