The robot lords of the dancefloor have called it quits after 28 years redefining pop and dance music – we run through their era beyond the biggest hits
You could be forgiven for thinking “end of an era” has lost all meaning. Sean Kingston disappears into the ether? End of an era. The ageing pub rock band down the road finally calls it a day? End of an era. Literally anything ceases to exist, in a world that’s so stagnant and still? End of an era.
This week, we collectively learnt the true meaning of the phrase when Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, aka Daft Punk, bid the world adieu via an eight-minute video titled Epilogue. After 28 years, four studio albums, countless live shows, several Grammys, and much more besides, the globetrotting electronic duo pulled the curtain on one of the most thrilling musical projects of all time.
But lamenting their dissolution after three very busy decades doesn’t feel quite right. After all, the very existence of Daft Punk – all cryptic anonymity and industry evasion – has always felt a little beyond the here and now. If anything, knowing they are no longer active feels like a golden opportunity to take stock of a reality-warping creative legacy that kicked against convention and comparison.
Bangalter and de Homem-Christo‘s rise from stalwarts of the Parisian “French touch” scene in the mid-1990s, to envelope-pushing house gurus on their 1997 debut album Homework tapped the Zeitgeist for a singular mood. Combined, singles “Around the World” and “Da Funk” doubled as a far-reaching introduction to a pair who were filtering forward-pushing euphoria like few others.
Their M.O. crystallised on the critically-devoured Discovery. When it dropped back in 2001, it felt almost Thriller-like in the sheer amount of FM-friendly monsters it managed to pack in. Underpinning the irresistible electro-pop of “One More Time” and “Digital Love” was the pair’s joint masterclass at sampling. Not since Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, or the Bomb Squad’s work on Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back, had an album rendered what is essentially borrowing down to such a fine, fully original art.
Consolidating their ascension to pop iconography, the arrival of Random Access Memories in 2018 – eight years after the somewhat middling dance-rock of Human After All – felt like a statement to end all statements. While not quite as vital as, say, In Utero, Back To Black or Blackstar, it was unashamedly huge and pristine, and marked a kind of musical self-actualisation of two artists who always strove for their own version of perfection.
In steadily revolutionising electronic music, Daft Punk simultaneously upended the landscape of modern pop. Not since New Order had an electronic group so singlehandedly honed in on their own vision and made it accessible to the world. With countless collaborations and remixes, they dreamt up a self-contained universe of sound and vision – one that took in the soundtrack to Tron: Legacy, as well as the sublime visual accompaniment to Discovery, Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem. From behind those masks, nothing must have seemed impossible.
As we reckon with the news, looking forward feels right. But first, let’s cast our ears and eyes back. Beyond the hits, here’s a rundown of some of the deep cuts, remixes, sessions, and lesser-known gems from Daft Punk’s three-decade voyage toward to now: the very real – the almost touchable – end of an era.
DARLIN’
Before the iconic helmets and globetrotting superstardom, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo cut their teeth with future Phoenix member Laurent Brancowitz in a band called Darlin’. Formed in Versailles, France in 1992, the trio named themselves after a Beach Boys song and released their first songs via Stereolab's Duophonic imprint.
It was a loose, genre-warping affair, spanning scrappy guitar and hypnotising dub experimentation. In other words, it was firmly in the territory of trial-and-error, but therein lies the lure. Strain your ear just a little and you can trace the early wizardry of artists who would go stratospheric within a few years.
Curiously, a review in British music magazine Melody Maker called the trio’s music “a daft punky thrash”. The band split shortly thereafter and, in their first sample as a duo, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo put the Melody Maker slight to good use a year later.
DAFT CLUB
In the early 2000s, Daft Punk ran an online music service that Bangalter said established “a connection between people that listen to our music and ourselves”. “There‘s no limits of time, and it helps people get and listen to this music,” he added. “A track that could have been done today can be online tomorrow.”
The pair would lift the name of the service – Daft Club – to title their debut remix album, released in 2003. Despite a notoriously disparaging review on Pitchfork at the time, the release – not least its wonderfully propulsive, John Carpenter-like opener “Ouverture” – has really stood the test of time (the added extra of beginning via the sound of a 56k dial-up modem only seals the deal.)
Insofar as Daft Punk YouTube comments go, “Daft Punk remixing Daft Punk makes Daft Punk sound more like Daft Punk than Daft Punk” couldn’t be more on the money.
EVEN FURTHER (1996)
In the annals of pre-helmeted Daft Punk lore, Even Further is right up there. The pair‘s first live performance in the States, when virtually nobody there had heard of them, was at the festival at Eagle Cave Campground in Wisconsin in 1996.
Blessedly, a low-quality but perfectly passable 30-minute video of the set survives, and what a trip it is. Daft Punk pre-helmets and Homework – Boiler Room before Boiler Room was a thing – it’s a relic from the recent past that delivers on fare-searing techno, 303-heavy acid house and some truly breathtaking mixing.
If you‘re going to pour one out for Daft Punk – and you really should – best do it with this blitz blasting from decent speakers.
BBC ESSENTIAL MIX (1997)
As institutions on the airwaves go, BBC’s Essential Mix takes some beating. From David Holmes and Sasha, to Portishead and Flying Lotus, it has granted a major platform to myriad musical pioneers at the peak of their powers.
Recorded in one take in Busy P‘s front room and broadcast on Radio 1 just after the release of Homework in early 1997, Daft Punk’s first and only mix for the show remains a genre-hopping joy to behold. All gas and no brakes, it packs in everything from American alternative rock band Ween and Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic “I have a dream” speech, to their very own ”Rock N Roll” and ”Around the World”. Statement of intent doesn’t quite cover it.
“MUSIC SOUNDS BETTER WITH YOU”
The summer of 1998 was soundtracked by its fair share of bangers. Fatboy Slim‘s ”The Rockafeller Skank”. “Deeper Underground” by Jamiroquai. B*Witched’s “C‘est La Vie”. All straight-up, pure-cut gold.
And then there was “Music Sounds Better With You”. The earworming handiwork of low-key French house trio, Stardust, the global one-hit wonder was accompanied by a Michel Gondry-directed video of a young boy building a model aeroplane while Stardust – looking not entirely unlike Daft Punk – performed on television. Sure enough, it was later revealed that Thomas Bangalter was one-third of the operation. Once you discover a member of Daft Punk is behind it all, you can’t help but feel silly for it not clicking a lot sooner.
PURE HARDCORE
Both with de Homem-Christo and on his own, Bangalter explored all kinds of sonic avenues pre and post-fame. Right up there with most incendiary is Memory, a collaborative EP with French DJ and producer Manu Le Malin.
Released with little fanfare in between Daft Punk albums three and four, it’s a two-track, 191 BPM blast of trouncing hardcore. Somewhere between the off-kilter rhythms of opener “M18”, and the dizzying frequencies of “12.02” is the unmistakable, no-fucks-given spirit that propelled the Bangalter and de Homem-Christo from Parisian house heroes to household names over a decade beforehand.
VERIDIS QUO
Though there's much deeper cuts strewn throughout their back catalogue, the faux-orchestral “Veridis Quo” from Discovery is a supremely unravelling mini-masterpiece that will always warrant gushing praise. Much like the vaporwave-like “Nightvision” and “Something About Us” on the same album, it encapsulates in under six minutes everything that’s quite literally stellar about mid-tempo Daft Punk.
Maybe it’s something to do with the fact it sits alongside full-on bops like “Voyager” and “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” but the way it pairs mellotron-like synth with bass and a simple 4/4 beat manages to cast a spell to this day. Aside from being wordplay on the Latin phrase “Quo vadis?” (“Where are you going?”) the title of the song can – get this – also read as “very disco” Flip those two words and what do you get?
ALIVE 1997
Initially released as part of the Daft Club service, Daft Punk‘s debut live album, Alive 1997, was released amid the runaway success of Discovery in 2001. But as its title suggests, it was recorded four years previously. Across 45 all-too-short minutes, it’s an exhilarating retreat back to Birmingham’s Que Club in November of that breakthrough year. Though live albums, by their very nature, tend to capture various different sides to an act’s artistry, Alive 1997 is almost prismatic in just how lucidly it reveals Daft Punk’s shapeshifting, masterfully-executed craft at the time.
CHORD MEMORY
Savant-like production and musicianship aside, Daft Punk were positively in their element when it came to working with – and mutating to varying degrees of recognition – other people’s music. An outright peak from the pair‘s only official compilation album, Musique Vol. 1 (1993-2005), their reworking of “Chord Memory” by German house DJ and producer Ian Pooley is a feat of pure imagination. Among other elements, its undulating bass patterns transform an otherwise solid track into a heavenly dancefloor gem. As we all edge ever closer to the discothèque, this more than delivers on the frisson so sorely missed.
HORIZON
If you’re a Daft Punk fan and lucky enough to live in Japan, you’ll no doubt be familiar with “Horizon”. If you’re not, lucky you. Evoking fellow French pop maestros Air, this bonus track from Random Access Memories melds ornate instrumentation and cosmic pedal steel guitar to deliver a truly Technicolor au revoir from the pair. Granted, it’s probably something to do with being low-key cursed with the knowledge that they are no more, but this dose of slow-burning electro-soul feels like the world’s most beloved robot duo passing through the earth’s atmosphere on the way to elsewhere.