They are rusty at being Daft Punk. They’ve been gone for a long time. Since their last proper studio release, 2005’s Human After All, they’ve done just a handful of interviews—three, maybe four, tops—and they’re badly out of practice. They’re still answering questions like Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, instead of like Daft Punk, which is a problem, because they’d prefer that you not think of them as people at all.
That’s partly what the robot helmets are for. It’s why you’ve never seen their faces.
"I remember when I was a kid, I would watch Superman, and I was super into the feeling of knowing that Clark Kent is Superman and no one knows," Bangalter says. "We always thought as we were shaping this thing that the fantasy was actually so much more exciting than the idea of being the most famous person in the world."
It’s a Saturday afternoon in Los Angeles, and the two men are seated, sans disguises, outside at a café on La Brea. They’re talking about their kids (two each), the vagaries of the California wildlife that haunt Bangalter’s house up in the hills (deer and coyotes, mostly, though recently he lost a night of sleep to the hooting of what he’s pretty sure was an owl), and a bunch of other things they’d really rather not discuss—a bunch of things they will later try to take back—because finally, after eight years, there is a new Daft Punk record.
It’s called Random Access Memories—they whisper the title across the table, because it’s February and no one else knows this yet, and because with Daft Punk nearly everything is a secret. The record is only Daft Punk’s fourth in sixteen years, not counting the soundtrack work they did on Disney’s 2010 sequel to Tron, and the first that the two men, who recorded their first three albums at home (two in Bangalter’s bedroom, one in his living room), have made in a proper studio. It’s a big and lush and opulent ’70s-disco record, glamorous in places and almost mournful in others, like something a heartbroken vacuum cleaner might drive around to at night in Detroit. It’s got choirs and flutes and some of the same guys who played on Thriller and Off the Wall, and Panda Bear from Animal Collective, and Nile Rodgers from Chic, and a gang of other collaborators—Italian disco god Giorgio Moroder, "Rainbow Connection" guy Paul Williams, pianist Chilly Gonzales, house titan Todd Edwards, the Strokes’ Julian Casablancas, Pharrell Williams singing about sex and ancient Greek mythology. It sounds like it cost about a million dollars to make, if not more, an estimate they don’t deny but also won’t confirm.
Videos: A Brief History of Daft Punk’s Pop Culture Cameos
More to the point, Random Access Memories is a calculated departure from past Daft Punk records, even for Daft Punk, a band that, over the course of its lengthy reign as the most well-known and critically revered dance-music act on the planet, has made a point of never making the same record twice. Only a handful of people have heard the album so far, but the two men already seem resigned to the possibility that no one will like it.
"In Scream 2, they have this discussion about how sequels always suck," Bangalter says. In this scheme, Random Access Memories might as well be Scream 4. "The thing we can ask ourselves at some point is like: We’re making music for twenty years. How many bands and acts do you have that are still making good music after twenty years? It always sucks—almost always, you know?"
And de Homem-Christo, who has said maybe a few dozen words up to this point, most of them about salad and directed at our waitress, peers over the golden top edge of his sunglasses and says: "So our new album is supposed to really suck."
Since you’re probably wondering: They look not unlike a couple of guys in a rock band. Bangalter, 38, is tall, slightly rumpled, bearded, hair thinning, handsome in a cinema-studies-professor kind of way—he’s funny, good with eye contact, palpably eager to make himself understood. Today he’s wearing fashionable motorcycle boots, black jeans, an unstructured suit jacket, and a big drapey scarf, perfectly tied, framing a neat Daft Punk pyramid of bare chest. De Homem-Christo is one year older, and a lot shorter. He has long stringy metal-guy hair and weary pale eyes, and his black boots have gold spurs. Everyone calls him Guy-Man.
Bangalter talks a lot—about art, and technology, and blockbuster movies like Star Wars, which he loves. De Homem-Christo barely talks at all, which is disconcerting at first and then sort of fascinating. Later I’ll give the two of them a ride home in my car, and from the backseat, de Homem-Christo will break character to beatbox the hard-hitting percussion break in Montell Jordan’s "This Is How We Do It" when it comes on the radio, a sublime and unexpected moment, like watching a goat yell like a man. It’s always been like this: Bangalter is the guy who generates the raw material, the one who more often has his hands on the actual instruments; de Homem-Christo is the group’s editor, its taciturn enforcer.
They met in the eighth grade in Paris, and for years would do anything but play music together. They’d go to movies, museums, the library, argue about Warhol and Kubrick and Kraftwerk. Bangalter’s father is Daniel Vangarde, the French songwriter who wrote the supremely annoying Ottawan hit "D.I.S.C.O."; de Homem-Christo’s parents were in advertising but had a thing for music, too. His dad listened to stuff like "Led Zeppelin and ’Hotel California’ every Sunday," he says. De Homem-Christo’s accent is so fantastically Parisian that when he says "Hotel California," it sounds like "O-tell Cal-e-forn-ya"—like another, better, more magical song. "That’s what I still listen to.
To hear them tell it, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo have led disconcertingly normal lives over the past couple of decades, even as, beginning with 1995’s G-funk-on-Ecstasy club smash "Da Funk" and peaking with 2001’s Discovery, a brightly colored riot of classic rock and disco and rubbery, blissfully stupid hooks, they’ve become the objects of cultlike obsession—shadowy leaders of a congregation that numbers in the millions. They stopped playing shows in 1997 after touring for their debut album, Homework, which seems improbable but turns out to be true, and proceeded to spend the next bunch of years going down the anonymity wormhole. Early on, they appeared on a magazine cover and in a handful of press photos with their faces exposed, but by Homework, they were already wearing masks in public, or turning their backs to interviewers, or both.
They didn’t so much as go out in public again as Daft Punk until 2006, when they played Coachella. "When we stopped touring," Bangalter says, "we were touring in front of, like, 900 or 1,200 or 1,800" people. Nearly a decade later, the two men walked out onto an Inland Empire stage wearing robot helmets and saw 40,000 fans staring back at them. It was "a shock, because this is really virtual, you know? We were not prepared."
The experience made them even more grateful that they’d chosen to do things the way they had. The costumes granted them a measure of freedom that their friends, people like Kanye West, had long since lost. It’s what allowed the two of them to sit out here on the sidewalk, sipping strawberry lemonade, while Daft Punk was out in the ether somewhere, fighting crime, playing music, or doing whatever superheroes do when their alter egos are somewhere else.
"It’s much easier to start with the control embedded in your personality, you know?" Bangalter says.
I ask if, like Clark Kent, who aspired to a normal life he could never really have, they ever feel trapped by the decision to put on superhero costumes all those years ago—that they have to be these robots now, whether they want to or not. Actually what I ask is:
_Is there ever a moment where you’re like, "I have to put on the fucking cape again"? _
De Homem-Christo, confused, turns to his bandmate. His English is very good but prone to occasional breakdowns in response to stupid questions. "Fucking what?"
Bangalter switches to French—C’est comme, "Ah, merde, encore on met la cape de super-héros." C’est comme les mecs qui sont—then turns back to me: "No."
"No, we don’t," de Homem-Christo says.
Daft Punk, they say, is something that happens only when they want it to. Superman has to be Superman all the time.
"We work a lot," de Homem-Christo says, "but we are not in the superhero costume—"
"Every day," Bangalter says.
"Every day," de Homem-Christo says.
We get up from our table, wander past some menswear stores and an open-air lot selling giant plastic figurines—a dragon, a big fiberglass Marge clutching a big fiberglass Maggie. Everyone we pass looks like they’ve illegally downloaded at least one Daft Punk album, possibly all three. No one gives them a second look.
They say it’s hard to talk about the new record without talking about the old ones. "Homework, we did it, and it was a way to say to the rock kids, like, ’Electronic music is cool,’ " Bangalter says. "Discovery was the opposite, of saying to the electronic kids, ’Rock is cool, you know? You can like that.’ " Human After All—noisy and dense and a little bummed out, like something they wanted to be done with in a hurry—was about questioning the craft and seemingly effortless pleasures of the first two. It was a deliberately imperfect record, like a Jackson Pollock painting, or, says Bangalter, "a stone that’s unworked."
For a while, around 2005, they quit writing music altogether. They made Electroma, a wordless road movie about two helmet-wearing robots who long to be human and ultimately self-immolate out on a California salt flat. (Variety: "If auds thought Gus Van Sant’s Gerry and Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny were slow and pretentious, they should get a load of Daft Punk’s Electroma.") They started touring again, stood at the center of a gigantic blinking pyramid in front of hundreds of thousands of people, kept at it through the 2008 Grammys, where they performed "Stronger" with Kanye, and then stopped before anyone had time to get used to their presence. Skrillex, the 25-year-old dubstep wunderkind who in many ways has inherited Daft Punk’s mantle as the mainstream-crossover dance musician of the moment, told me that seeing Daft Punk perform in Los Angeles in 2007 "is when I realized I really wanted to make dance music."
Eventually they tried to make a new album using laptops, but gave up because everything they wrote felt lifeless. "Those tools were very good at many things," Bangalter says, but they were worthless in terms of "generating emotion as musical instruments."
The entire time they were expecting, even hoping, to be made irrelevant. Electronic dance music had never been more popular—has never been more popular than at this very moment—but to their ears it sounded derivative, safe, like a wan copy of something they themselves had done a decade prior, back when they were trying to overthrow their own elders. "It’s always this thing where we’re constantly waiting for something that will come in electronic music that says, ’Daft Punk sucks!’ " Bangalter says. "That’s actually much more interesting and exciting than someone who is paying homage."
We duck into a coffee shop de Homem-Christo says I should try, and I ask them what they think about Skrillex. Bangalter says he respects him for just that reason—that he isn’t boring, or trying to be Daft Punk. "Here’s someone that is trying to create something new and to not follow something," Bangalter says. "There’s an attempt, you know?
De Homem-Christo says he hasn’t really heard enough of Skrillex’s music, or any other kind of contemporary dance music, to say—he still mostly listens to Zeppelin, the Beatles, classic rock. He points to the speakers overhead. A Solange song, "Losing You"—bright, bounding, primary-colored pop music—is playing.
"That’s good," he says.
In the end, they wound up making the "Daft Punk sucks!" record themselves. At a moment when mainstream pop has never sounded more like Daft Punk, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo went the other way, crafting a gold-plated homage to the pop music of their youth, the kind of sweet and sad and sexy sounds that ruled radio waves years before most of their fan base was even born. It’s extremely impressive musically, weirdly pedantic in places—unless you think there’s merit in listening to Giorgio Moroder haltingly talk about his early days as a German club warrior over a click track—and probably a little overgenerous to guys like Panda Bear, who basically gets to sneak a solo track onto one of the most anticipated albums of the past decade. I would say the disco-connoisseur-y songs outnumber the potential pop smashes by a ratio of about 4 to 1, but there are definitely a couple of potential pop smashes. I have no idea who they imagine Random Access Memories being for, besides themselves, but there is something seductive about that, the band’s ability to do something so totally, breathtakingly self-indulgent—it makes you want to try to see it their way.
"It’s maybe not ’Kill the father,’" Bangalter says. "But it’s like: Things have to move on."
They’d only ever made albums at home, by themselves, and so for Random Access Memories they hired the world’s finest session musicians—50-, 60-year-old guys, legends in the game—and had them play practically every note on the record by hand. And they spent a ton of cash, their own at first. "In the history of pop music, a lot of great records cost an enormous amount of money," Bangalter explains. "There used to be a time where people that had means to experiment would do it, you know? That’s what this record is about."
It’s Sunday now. The two men have invited me to Daft Arts, the band’s production office, to talk more about the album, and to take back a few things they’ve already said that they wished they hadn’t—about their families, mostly, their kids, where they live when they’re not here, that kind of thing. Anything personal, basically.
"We’d prefer if you said that we didn’t want to talk about it," Bangalter asks quietly out in the shady parking lot. Later I’ll ask Pharrell about the two men, and he’ll say basically the same thing: "I feel funny divulging information, because they’re like Men in Black—they’ll zap you."
Even my invitation to Daft Arts is contingent on not disclosing where it’s located, beyond the fact that it’s on a Hollywood studio lot, beyond a gate and a security guard and up some stairs. When I walk in there’s a clothes rack with a bunch of garment bags from Yves Saint Laurent dangling from it, and a bookshelf displaying a handful of souvenirs: limited-edition Daft Punk Tron action figures, a Smiths box set, and four indifferently placed Grammys. One wall is covered with a blowup photo of Earth seen from the moon—big and bright and foreboding. There’s a sample on Random Access Memories, on the last track, "Contact," that is an excerpt of a conversation between mission control and Apollo 17. "The last Apollo," Bangalter says. "The last captain of the last mission."
I try to pin down a few more details about the new record, like which one of them is behind the melancholy robot voice that haunts much of Random Access Memories.
"Doesn’t matter," Bangalter says.
His phone rings—there’s someone downstairs at the gate who needs to get in—and he excuses himself for a moment, then returns carrying another YSL garment bag, the contents of which he won’t specify.
They either will or won’t tour again, will or won’t make another movie—I ask a couple of times about what’s next, and they’re genial but evasive, and then I ask again, and Bangalter cuts me off.
"We’re not going to tell you what’s going to happen," he says firmly, and then smiles, really smiles, wide and open and guileless as can be.
_Zach Baron is a writer in New York. This is his first article for_ GQ.