Skylar Spence

Ryan DeRobertis — performing as Skylar Spence — grew up on Long Island absorbing Chic and Duran Duran before turning those influences into something stranger and more slippery: sample-chopped funk built in Ableton, pitched down and stretched until the original source becomes a ghost of itself. He first surfaced in 2012 under the name Saint Pepsi, a moniker retired under legal pressure from a cola company that apparently monitors the internet, and resurfaced in 2015 with the debut album Prom King, a record that traded the vaporwave abstraction for jittery Stratocaster lines, his own vocals, and a production philosophy built on making listeners unable to locate the seam between hardware and software. Stereogum named him their artist to watch in 2013; Pitchfork took notice shortly after. He currently operates out of Brooklyn, releasing work under both names depending on the occasion.