His father, Tadeusz (Tad) Adam Menert, had a passion for music and played drums in a small Polish psych-rock band.
From there they migrated to the United States in 1987 with the help of a sponsor they met through Antic's letter column,[2][3] and moved to Loveland, Colorado, where Tadeusz Menert became a librarian at the Larimer County Detention Center.
The group was influenced by artists like the Beastie Boys, Tha Alkaholiks, A Tribe Called Quest, Wu-Tang Clan, The Roots, and The Casualties as well as by old school hip hop, funk, punk rock, and the skater culture.
[7][8] Derek Vincent Smith and Michal Menert began working on Pretty Lights as a side project in the summer of 2004,[9][10] producing the first album, Taking Up Your Precious Time in 2005 while on a trip to Europe.
[11] Believing it did not make sense to charge for a product that individuals would simply rip off the internet, Menert and Smith mimicked the business model of Steely Dan by releasing the album for free.
[12] On December 7, 2006, twenty-four-year-old Michal Menert was robbed at gunpoint and severely injured by three Loveland, Colorado gang members during a drug deal.
He was admitted to McKee Medical Center in Loveland with a stab wound in the chest just missing his heart and a tip to wrist laceration with tendon damage on his dominant hand.
Pleading guilty to a lesser charge, Menert was sentenced to three years of probation, six months in prison, and 200 hours of community service.
[11] While taking care of his father and under house arrest, Menert worked at Walmart and produced his album Dreaming of a Bigger Life.
[11] By spring 2010, Derek Vincent Smith had produced two solo albums under the name Pretty Lights and the project had undergone a shift in sound.
On June 8, 2010, one week after his father's death due to cancer, Menert released Dreaming of a Bigger Life for free as the first album of the newly formed Pretty Lights Music label.
Super Best Records roster currently include Late Night Radio, KEEPLOVE?, JK Soul, Shuj Roswell, Mux Mool, Maddy O'Neal (formerly from Krooked Drivers), The PARTY People, Tnertle, Willdabeast.
Other current members: Matt VanDenHeuvel, Nicholas Gerlach, Jules Thoma, Richard 'Sleepy' Floyd, Jason Scholla, and Borntown Macleod In 2016, the Pretty Fantastics released their first full length album '1' followed by 'From the Sea' in November 2018.