There was something cartoonish about the band's early singles that compensated for the anonymity of the men behind them. It was an idea compounded by Michel Gondry's mesmerising video for Around The World, where every instrument is represented by a groups of dancers skeletons represent the guitar line, mummies act out the drum pattern and synchronised swimmers are the synths.
It took three years for the band to record a follow-up, during which time Bangalter also scored a major hit - Music Sounds Better with You - with his side project Stardust.
Discovery, released in , was almost wilfully anti-cool, steeped in references to 70s disco and 80s crooners. But the band chopped, spliced, filtered and filleted those sounds to create audacious new songs, with a sense of fun and showmanship that dance music often lacks. If you can listen to the ridiculous guitar arpeggios of Aerodynamic or the party-starting chants of Crescendolls without cracking a smile, they seemed to be saying, maybe it's you who's the robot.
The album's most enduring song, however, is Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. Kanye West later lifted the track and used it as the basis for his own song, Stronger. Daft Punk were unaware of the sample until they heard it on the radio in Los Angeles.
It sounds really big. It's not a collaboration in the studio, but the vibe of the music we do separately connected in what he did with the song. Another four years passed before the release of their third and least essential album, Human After All, after which they wrote the soundtrack to Disney's sci-fi sequel Tron: Legacy.
They returned to form with 's Random Access Memories - a lush, opulent tribute to the music they grew up with, recorded entirely on live instruments, and featuring guest appearances from Chic's Nile Rodgers, Muppets composer Paul Williams and disco innovator Giorgio Moroder, who narrated his own life story over nine minutes of interlocking dance grooves. The album, which cost more than a million dollars to make, was preceded by the hit single Get Lucky.
Speaking to NPR, Bangalter said the song represented the record's theme of connecting the past, present and future of dance music. The album brought the duo to a whole new audience, but now it also appears to be a full stop. The end point in their disco odyssey. The video announcing their split was based on an excerpt from their film Electroma. As one of the robot bodies disintegrated, a caption appeared stating " - ".
The album helped kick off a hipster-friendly mids microgenre that would earn the regrettable name bloghouse. Beyond the music, however, Daft Punk leveled up in one other way around this time: In the process of making Discovery , they traded in their plastic Halloween masks for robot helmets, conjuring their own iconography out of thin air. Like Discovery , the Coachella set changed a lot for Daft Punk. This time, shows were considerably larger, as they brought the pyramid to five continents for 48 dates.
And eventually, the pair would produce for the likes of the Weeknd, Arcade Fire, and Kanye himself, on Yeezus. The Coachella set and resulting tour also reverberated throughout the industry, most obviously by ushering in an era of gaudy set designs in rap and electronic music. To their credit, Daft Punk wanted little to do with the world they helped create.
The Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers—aided track became a cultural sensation from the moment it first appeared as a snippet on Saturday Night Live ; it would eventually sell nearly 9. It would appear that Daft Punk died out in the desert, just like they were reborn there nearly 15 years ago. The robots had inspired real human emotions. We should be thankful that they went out with a little mystique, helmets on and all. The truly depressing thing would be knowing how the magic trick is done.
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Are they actually retired? It seems beside the point, given how intermittent their output has been over the past few years, as well as the fact that we never really knew them to begin with. There are few times when we are all listening to the same thing; usually it means someone has died.
The draw of such moments is amplified by the pandemic. Even if Daft Punk remained unknowable, their music offered a vision of social life, whether it was the sounds of crowds, the samples chopped up and braided together, the tributes to their teachers. The music was irresistibly obnoxious and sleazy, which fit the stories he brought back. It was confident, and it drew our curiosity toward new zones of the night. A year into isolation, we miss the peaks of being out, the high of losing yourself in the madness of the crowd.
For me, that yearning has grown more diffuse. But I now miss the entirety of the night, especially ones revolving around any big event. The anticipation and eavesdropping.
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