Saint Pepsi
DeRobertis was a Boston College dropout uploading homemade retro-funk to Bandcamp when, in late 2014, an email arrived from PepsiCo. "They had caught wind of the project and… liked the music but they have the trademark." He was given the rest of the year to finish his tour dates, and rebranded in January 2015 as Skylar Spence — a name taken from a Woody Allen character, and from one of his own Saint Pepsi tracks.
Nine Saint Pepsi albums between December 2012 and May 2013 — Hit Vibes, Empire Building, Studio 54 — are future funk's foundational texts: gibber boogie built from the Mario Kart 64 soundtrack and 1980s slow jams, which The Fader called "restless and nostalgic and sonically curious". Prom King, his 2015 debut as Skylar Spence, took the sound to Carpark Records and into actual pop songwriting.
He now performs under both names. Carpark reissued Prom King for its tenth anniversary in September 2025 and puts Hit Vibes on lemonade-yellow vinyl in June 2026. Headlining ElectroniCON in 2025 with his first Saint Pepsi set in roughly five years, he told the room "I dropped out of school for this" — then called it surreal, having made most of the material alone, in headphones, on his parents' couch.