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By Larry Fitzmaurice

December 2, 2018

Daft Punk ’s Homework is, in its pure existence, a study in contradictions. The debut album from Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo arrived in 1997, right around the proliferation of big-beat and electronica—a twin-headed hydra of dance music fads embraced by the music industry following the commercialization of early ’90s rave culture—but when it came to presumptive contemporaries from those pseudo-movements, Homework shared Sam Goody rack space and not much else. Daft Punk’s introduction to the greater world also came at a time when French electronic music was gaining international recognition, from sturdy discotheque designs to jazzy, downtempo excursions—music that sounded miles away from Homework ’s rude, brutalist house music.

In the 21 years since Homework ’s release, Daft Punk have strayed far from its sound with globe-traversing electronic pop that, even while incorporating other elements of dance music subgenres, has more often than not kept house music’s building blocks at arms’ length. 2001’s Discovery was effectively electronic pop-as-Crayola box, with loads of chunky color and front-and-center vocals that carried massive mainstream appeal. Human After All from 2005 favored dirty guitars and repetitive, Teutonic sloganeering, while the pair took a nostalgia trip through the history of electronic pop itself for 2013’s Random Access Memories . Were it not for a few choice Homework tracks that pop up on 2007’s exhilarating live document Alive 2007 , one might assume that Homework has been lost in the narrative that’s formed since its release—that of Daft Punk as robot-helmeted superstar avatars, rather than as irreverent house savants.

But even as the straightforward and strident club fare on Homework remains singular within Daft Punk’s catalog, the record also set the stage for the duo’s career to this very day—a massively successful and still-going ascent to pop iconography, built on the magic trick-esque ability to twist the shapes of dance music’s past to resemble something seemingly futuristic. Whether you’re talking about Bangalter and Homem-Christo’s predilection for global-kitsch nostalgia, their canny and self-possessed sense of business savvy, or their willingness to wear their influences on their sleeve like ironed-on jean-jacket patches—it all began with Homework .

It couldn’t possibly make more sense that a pair of musicians whose most recent album sounds like a theme park ride through pop and electronic music’s past got their big break at Disneyland. It was 1993, and schoolboy friends Bangalter and Homem-Christo’s rock band with future Phoenix guitarist Laurent Brancowitz, Darlin’—named after a track from the 1967 Beach Boys album Wild Honey that the three shared an affinity for—had disbanded after a year of existence that included a few songs released on Stereolab ’s Duophonic label. (Melody Maker writer Dave Jennings notoriously referred to their songs as possessing “a daft punky thrash,” which led to the pair assuming the Daft Punk moniker.)

While attending a rave in Paris, Bangalter and Homem-Christo had a chance encounter with Glasgow DJ/producer Stuart McMillan, the co-founder of the Soma Recordings dance label; like any aspiring musicians would, they gave him a demo tape of early Daft Punk music. The following year Soma released Daft Punk’s debut single “The New Wave,” a booming and acid-tinged instrumental that would later evolve into Homework cut “Alive.”

A follow-up, “Da Funk” b/w “Rollin’ & Scratchin’,” hit shops in 1995; according to a Muzik profile two years later, its initial 2,000-platter pressing was “virtually ignored” until rave-electronica bridge-gap veterans the Chemical Brothers started airing out its A-side during DJ sets. A major-label bidding war ensued, with Virgin as the victor which re-released “Da Funk” as a proper single in 1996 with non- Homework track “Musique” as its B-side. During this time, Bangalter and Homem-Christo casually worked on the 16 tunes that would make up Homework in the former’s bedroom, utilizing what The Guardian ’s Ben Osborne referred to in 2001 as “ low technology equipment ”—two sequencers, a smattering of samplers, synths, drum machines, and effects, with an IOMEGA zip drive rounding out their setup.

Bangalter and Homem-Christo’s work ethic while assembling the bulk of Homework was of the type that makes sloths appear highly efficient by comparison: no more than eight hours a week, over the course of five months. “We have not spent much time on Homework ,” Bangalter casually bragged to POP . “The main thing is that it sounds good… We have no need to make music every day.” The songs were crafted with the intention of being released as singles (“We do not really want to make albums,” Bangalter claimed in the same interview), Homework ’s eventual sequencing a literal afterthought after the pair realized they had enough material to evenly fill four sides of two vinyl platters. “Balance,” the pair said in unison when asked about Homework ’s format-specific sequencing in Dance Music Authority following the album’s release. “It is done for balance.”

Indeed, Homework is practically built to be consumed in side-long chunks; taking the album in at a single 75-minute listen can feel like running a 5K right after eating an entire pizza. Its A-side kicks off with the patient build of “Daftendirekt”—itself a live-recording excerpt of introductory music used during a Daft Punk set at 1995’s I Love Techno festival in Ghent—and concludes with the euphoric uplift of “Phoenix”; the B-side opens with the literal oceanic washes of “Fresh” before stretching its legs with the loopy, Gershon Kingsley-interpolating “Around the World” and the screeching fist-pump anthem “Rollin’ & Scratchin’.” The third side keeps things light with the flashy, instructional “Teachers” before getting truly twisted on “Rock’n Roll,” and the fourth side takes a few rubbery detours before landing on the full-bodied “Alive”—the thicker and meaner final form of “The New Wave”—and, quixotically, a slight and rewound “Da Funk” return, aptly titled “Funk Ad.”

Bangalter explained to POP that the title of Homework carries a few meanings: “You always do homework in the bedroom,” he stated, referencing the album’s homespun origins before elaborating on the didactic exercise that creating the album represented: “We see it as a training for our upcoming discs. We would as well have been able to call it Lesson or Learning .” That instructional nature is reflexive when it comes to listeners’ presumptive relationship with the album, as Homework practically represents a how-to for understanding and listening to house music.

Nearly every track opens with a single sonic element—more often than not, that steady 4/4 rhythm inextricably tied to house music—adding every successive element of the track patiently, like a played-in-reverse YouTube video showcasing someone taking apart a gadget to see what’s inside. Such a pedagogic approach can have its pitfalls; there’s always a risk of coming across as too rigid, and Daft Punk arguably fell victim to such dull, fussy didacticism later in their careers. But they sidestep such follies on Homework by way of the purely pleasurable music they carefully assembled, piece-by-piece, for whoever was listening.

Under the umbrella of house music, Homework incorporates a variety of sounds snatched from various musical subgenres—G-funk’s pleasing whine, the cut-up vocal-sample style of proto-UK garage made popular by frequent Daft Punk collaborator Todd Edwards , disco’s delicious synths and glittery sweep—to craft a true musical travelogue that also hinted at the widescreen sonic scope they’d take later in their careers. Above all, the album represents a love letter to black American pop music that’s reverberated through Daft Punk’s career to date—from Janet Jackson ’s sample of “Daftendirekt” on her 2008 Discipline track “So Much Betta” to Will.i.am’s failed attempt to remix “Around the World” the year previous, as well as the duo’s continued collaborations with artists ranging from Pharrell to Kanye West and the Weeknd .

The spirit of house music’s Midwestern originators is also literally and musically invoked throughout. Over the winding house-party groove of “Teachers,” Daft Punk pay homage to their formative influences, ranging from George Clinton and Dr. Dre to Black house and techno pioneers like Lil Louis, DJ Slugo, and Parris Mitchell—and in a meta twist, the song’s structure itself is a literal homage to Mitchell’s 1995 Dance Mania! single “Ghetto Shout Out,” an interpolation clearly telegraphed in the middle of Daft Punk’s astounding contribution to BBC’s Essential Mix series in 1997 .

Alongside Daft Punk’s preoccupations with American popular music, Homework also carries a very specific and politically pointed evocation of their native Paris in “Revolution 909,” the fourth and final single released from Homework that doubled as a critique of anti-rave measures taken by the French government after Jacques Chirac assumed power in 1995. “I don’t think it’s the music they’re after—it’s the parties,” Homem-Christo told Dance Music Authority , with Bangalter adding, “They pretend [the issue is] drugs, but I don’t think it’s the only thing. There’s drugs everywhere, but they probably wouldn’t have a problem if the same thing was going on at a rock concert, because that’s what they understand. They don’t understand this music which is really violent and repetitive, which is house; they consider it dumb and stupid.”

“Revolution 909” opens with ambient club noise, followed by the intrusion of police sirens and intimidating megaphone’d orders to “stop the music and go home.” The accompanying Roman Coppola-helmed music video was even more explicit in depicting the frequent clash between ravers and law enforcement that marked dance music’s rise to the mainstream in the early-to-mid-’90s; amidst a kitschy instructional video on making tomato sauce, a pair of cops attempt to disperse a rave, a young woman escaping one of their grasps after he becomes distracted by a tomato sauce stain on his own lapel.

It’s been rumored, but never quite confirmed, that Bangalter himself appears in the video for “Revolution 909”—a slice of speculation gesturing towards the fact that Daft Punk’s Homework era was the time in which the duo began embracing anonymity. The now-iconic robot helmets wouldn’t be conceived of until the Discovery era, and the magazine stories that came during Daft Punk’s pre- Homework days were typically accompanied by a fresh-faced photo of the pair; during Homework ’s promotional cycle, however, they donned a variety of masks to obscure their visages, including frog and pig-themed disguises .

In conversation with Simon Reynolds for The New York Times in 2013, the pair cited Brian De Palma’s glam-rock masterpiece Phantom of the Paradise as artistic inspiration for their decision to retain visual anonymity, and Daft Punk’s press-shy tendencies (since Homework , the interviews they’ve chosen to take part in have been few and far between) are firmly situated in a long tradition of letting the music do the talking in dance culture—from the sci-fi evasiveness of Drexciya and Aphex Twin ’s relative reclusiveness to the preferred reticence of Burial and his contemporaries in the UK bass scene.

But refusing to turn themselves into rock stars upon Homework ’s release also afforded Daft Punk a crucial element that has undoubtedly aided their perpetual ascent to the present-day: control. Retaining a sense of anonymity was but one of the conditions that the pair struck with Virgin upon signing to the label before Homework ’s release; while the music they released under the label (before signing to Columbia in 2013) was licensed exclusively to Virgin, they owned it through their own Daft Trax production and management company.

But Homework proved influential in other, more explicitly musical ways. G-house, an emergent dance subgenre in the mid-2010s dominated by acts like French duo Amine Edge & Dance, borrows liberally from Daft Punk’s own musical mash of hip-hop’s tough sounds and house music’s pounding appeal; the dirty bloghouse bruisers of Parisian collective Ed Banger—founded by Pedro Winter aka Busy P, who acted as the group’s manager until 2008—would literally not exist were it not for Homework , and that goes double for the party-hardy bloghouse micro-movement of the mid-late 2000s, which Ed Banger’s artists practically dominated. Parisian duo Justice , in particular, owe practically the entirety of their 2007 landmark † to the scraping tension of “Rollin’ & Scratchin’.”

It’s tempting, too, to tie a connective thread between Homework and the brash sounds that proliferated during the peak heyday of the financial descriptor-cum-music genre known as EDM; close your eyes while listening to “Alive”’s big-tent sweep and try not to imagine the tune destroying a festival crowd. But for all of Homework ’s aggressive charms, it’s also retained a homespun intimacy in comparison to how positively widescreen Daft Punk’s music became afterwards. “We focus on the illusion because giving away how it’s done instantly shuts down the sense of excitement and innocence,” Bangalter told Pitchfork in 2013, and the fact that two Beach Boys fans fiddling around in their bedroom could conceive of something so generously in-your-face and playful as Homework might still stand as Daft Punk’s greatest illusion yet.

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Homework: How Daft Punk Schooled Us In The Future Of Dance Music

With their debut album, ‘Homework’, Daft Punk cemented their place in history, even while shaping what that history would become.

There are those who ride the waves of a scene, and there are those who create a new scene in the first place. Daft Punk have always been the latter, particularly in the formative years surrounding their debut album, Homework .

Listen to Homework here

Scrappy, raw and experimental.

Few musical acts have changed so much between albums as Daft Punk did in the four years between the release of Homework , on 20 January 1997, and its follow-up, Discovery . Reinvention is often the key to longevity in music, but it usually comes after years of exhausting the same tried and tested formula. For Daft Punk, however, their first two albums feel like the works of entirely different artists: meticulously detailed and polished, Discovery was stuffed with instant classics that aimed for the big leagues. Homework , however, represents everything that’s exciting about the best debut albums: scrappy, raw and experimental, it perfectly captured the spirit of Daft Punk’s live sets in their early years, with tracks mixing into each other perfectly, building and maintaining energy as if tooled for a club appearance.

Video footage from a live show in Wisconsin, in 1996, demonstrates this perfectly. Claiming to be the earliest evidence of Daft Punk on stage, there isn’t a mirror ball or robot mask in sight. Aesthetically, it could be any boiler-room gig – a small audience going wild as Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel De Homem-Christo rip through their set with absolute conviction. Sonically, it’s a wild ride: the beat is the only constant; everything else can be thrown in and pulled away again in an instant. Tracks like Homework ’s Rock’n Roll, with its pulsating scratch loop, brought the excitement of these shows to listeners’ stereos.

Hints of the Daft Punk to come

However, Homework isn’t just a recorded version of an early gig. Across its 75 minutes, there are plenty of hints of the Daft Punk to come, particularly with the standout hits Alive, Da Funk and Around The World. The ambition alone of these early singles was enough to change the dance music scene at the time, pushing house back into the mainstream.

Recorded on the cheap at home (a process that gave the album its title), Homework wasn’t truly intended to be an album: the singles are placed between the more experimental tracks in an attempt to form something that felt more traditionally cohesive. Even so, it’s clear there were two very difference sides to Daft Punk, even in these early stages.

Few artists could produce their debut album at home while ensuring it sounded perfect wherever it was played, but, channelling huge amounts of energy and live experience for the recording, Bangalter and De Homem-Christo already knew what would work and what wouldn’t on their limited set-up. It’s this adaptability that made Daft Punk’s journey from club act to festival headliners a smooth one. But while it’s one thing to make an album at home, it’s an entirely other thing to have it cement your place in musical history.

Here are some of the standout tracks that make Homework a lesson in the evolution of dance music…

Homework : the tracks you need to hear

Revolution 909.

There’s a drum sound so industrial it could have been recorded in a factory, landing with such a satisfying clang that it’s hard to focus on anything else. Revolution 909 sits perfectly as one of Homework ’s opening tracks, setting the energy for the rest of the album and leading flawlessly into Da Funk…

… Which is not only a highlight on Homework , it’s a highlight of Daft Punk’s entire career. When a band discovers a truly great riff, they strip down everything else and squeeze every last drop out of it. Da Funk is one of those: instant, direct, and memorable – everything you want from a house track. Also, shout-out to the music video by the masterful Spike Jonze, in which a dog with its leg in a cast gets treated with complete indifference by a load of strangers.

Nothing sums up the early Daft Punk sound quite like Phoenix. Though subtler than some of the Homework ’s later tracks, it’s fully earned its place amongst the group’s bigger hitters.

Around The World

What more is there to say that hasn’t already been said? Around The World remains a juggernaut in dance music. Every part has been tightened to perfection, making it the perfect instrumental for the duo to introduce their trademark robot voice on.

With a twitching bassline that props up an ever-growing beat, Burnin’ is surrounded by all kinds of pops, scratches, slides and squeaks. If Homework builds in intensity as a live set would, this is the peak of that experience.

One of the original singles dropped ahead of Homework’s release, Alive still sounds as huge as ever. There’s a reason they name their tours after this song…

Check out the best Daft Punk song of all time to discover how they got harder, better, faster, stronger.

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Review: daft punk, homework.

The album is a savory mix of borderline-cheesy filtered loops and super-simple drum machine beats and basslines.

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Sal Cinquemani is the co-founder and co-editor of Slant Magazine . His writing has appeared in Rolling Stone , Billboard , The Village Voice , and others. He is also an award-winning screenwriter/director and festival programmer.

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Homework Tracklist

Daftendirekt lyrics, wdpk 83.7 fm lyrics, revolution 909 lyrics, da funk lyrics, phoenix lyrics, fresh lyrics, around the world lyrics, rollin’ & scratchin’ lyrics, teachers lyrics, high fidelity lyrics, rock'n roll lyrics, oh yeah lyrics, burnin' lyrics, indo silver club lyrics, alive lyrics, funk ad lyrics.

If you wanted Daft Punk, but something original, lets go back to the beginning. In ‘97, Britpop (a fusion of British music and pop music) dominated the world. Basically, one year later, OK Go and Coldplay would form. Homework was a startler to some, and ravers were not ready for it. But this album has a few more surprises than it’s tongue-in-cheek manner.

“Alive” steps away from sampled music, while “Da Funk” , with its fusion of samples and house, made it one of the best-selling singles Daft Punk ever released, “Teachers” , with its fusion of rap and pop, stands classic, and was featured in many YouTube videos, while “Daftenedirekt” along with “Wdpk 83.7 FM” opened us up to the world of Daft Punk.

Most recognizable was the successful “Around the World” , which charted highly in many countries and had wide-reaching impacts on increasing Daft Punk’s popularity. The music video , which received heavy airplay on MTV, was helmed by the French director Michel Gondry and choreographed by Blanca Li.

In retrospect, this album is a bit raw and sounds way distinct than its successors, but it’s an instant classic to love and listen to for its more-than-1-hour duration.

“Homework” Q&A

Album credits.

Random Access Memories (10th Anniversary Edition)

Homework (25th Anniversary Edition)

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Daft Punk's debut album ‘Homework’ turns 25 years old

The French electronic duo Daft Punk are two of the most legendary and inspiring people within the industry. Forming in 1993, the pair broke numerous records and musical boundaries throughout their 28-year career. Releasing four studio albums and numerous singles, one album that always becomes a topic on music enthusiasts discussion is that of the duos debut album ‘Homework’ , released 20 January 1997, and the album has recently passed 25 years old in age.

The 16-track album contained some of Daft Punk’s most recognisable work including ‘ Da Funk’ , ‘Alive’ and the global smash hit and phenomenon  ‘Around The World’ all of which aligned the duo for future success, allowing them to become a household name. Fresh at the time, the duo took a simplistic approach to their music production and rarely used vocals throughout the album, this was a production style that was seen as a revival of house music at the time from critics. In today’s time the album constantly finds itself atop the greatest electronic albums of all time lists and is constantly referred to as inspiration for many of the popular artists of the present. ‘Homework’ also found itself successful from a sales standpoint, entering many album charts and garnering platinum sales certifications in countries the likes of France, The United Kingdom , New Zealand, and Canada, with the album having sold an estimated 2 million copies worldwide to date.

It’s safe to say that ‘Homework’ is one of the most impactful electronic albums of all time and its continual ability to inspire the artists of today is something that’s extremely unique and sees Daft Punk as one of the most influential artists in history. Take a trip down memory lane and listen to this monumental and timeless album for yourself on Spotify below.

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Daft Punk: Robot rock for the world

Daft Punk’s debut album “Homework” recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. We revisited the legacy of the famous DJ duo.

Susan Behrends Valenzuela

French DJ duo Daft Punk, who announced their retirement last year, recently remastered and re-released their debut studio album, “Homework,” on the 25th anniversary of its release. This new edition offers a chance to revisit the legacy of their influence on electronic music. (Staff Illustration by Susan Behrends Valenzuela)

Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer , Arts Editor February 28, 2022

Last year, Daft Punk released a video of themselves self-destructing to announce their retirement. This year marks the 25th anniversary of their debut album, “Homework.” 

Electronic music, as we know it today, came to be in 1997 with Daft Punk’s “Homework.” With their debut album, the DJ duo composed of two French teenagers — Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo — redefined what pop music could be by creating an album informed by their love of disco and rave culture. “Homework” blends the metallic thuds that defined European rave culture over the course of the 1990s with the infectious grooves of old disco records the two teens had collected over the years. The result, remastered this week and re-released as “Homework (25th Anniversary Edition),” is a musical wonder designed to inspire non-stop dancing — a perfect calibration of heavy bass-lines accompanied by spun-out melodies that suck you into a world of mechanized sound. 

Let’s begin with the title: “Homework.” In a 1997 interview with POP Magazine , Bangalter stated the title came about because the album was recorded in his bedroom, explaining, “you always do your homework in the bedroom.” “Homework” is the work of two DJs who are just getting started, exhibiting the free-flowing experimentation you’d expect from two students of music looking to do something new and working against the rules of a common assignment. There’s a quality of learning and devotion to the album, pinning it as the work of two tinkerers with a great respect for music. It’s for this reason that “Homework” remains Daft Punk’s most fun and energetic album to date, with its infectious and intoxicating throughline of invigorating rave tracks that continuously up the ante when it comes to what can be done with a couple of loopers and enough time in a bedroom. 

Given the fact that “Homework” was produced in a calm, domestic environment, how perfectly it works as a rave set for a bulk of dancing bodies is absolutely shocking. Their “Alive 1997” set is evidence of this fact, with its shriek-electronica, perfect transitions and pounding bass, demonstrating how Daft Punk transcended the death of disco and got generations to dance to their tunes by resuscitating disco’s popularity as a new sonic beast: a mish-mash of genres ranging from punk to U.K. garage. 

“We make dance music with a rock’n’roll attitude,” Bangalter said in a 1995 interview with POP Magazine . Growing up listening to everything from The Beach Boys to My Bloody Valentine, there’s a verve to Daft Punk’s work. “Homework” is an early blueprint of that spirit, mixing and mashing music of all sorts to develop a delightful trance that feels like the perfect algorithmic condensation of rhythms from the past, present, future and all regions of the world. 

“Around the World,” which marks the midpoint of “Homework,” evokes this drive to develop a universal sound to induce listeners worldwide to dance. “We just want our music to spread to as many people as possible,” said Bangalter in the 1995 interview.

Twenty-five years after the release of “Homework,” it’s clear Daft Punk’s music has reached all corners of the globe. After releasing their rave-based debut back in 1997, Daft Punk would go on to work with a variety of artists ranging from Kanye West to Julian Casablancas from The Strokes, accruing several Grammy wins along the way. 

Daft Punk quickly became the reference for everything innovative in music, constantly defying genre conventions by adopting a syncretic electronic style. The duo also overturned what could be done in terms of staging with their Alive 2006/2007 live tour, for which they built a pyramid structure for concert venues with which they would project aggressive light shows to accompany their concert, hearkening back to their early days as rave DJs in France. The recent release of Daft Punk’s concert film from that same era which accompanied the re-release of “Homework” demonstrates how they were able to build upon their set over the years, as a simple projector set-up went on to become a massive choreography of strobe lights and pulsating visuals. Despite cloaking themselves in the persona of robots, the duo came to represent the most lively music on the planet. 

“Homework” exhibits that brimming genius at its point of origin. Songs like “Da Funk” infuse the sounds of the city atop a G-Funk beat because every sound the world contains is a functional melody in the minds of Daft Punk. “Rollin’ & Scratchin’” is a hard, thumping piece of industrial techno, and it’s followed by “Teachers,” an homage to the duo’s funk idols. In any other band’s hands, such a juxtaposition would have been an absolute failure, but Daft Punk’s ingenuity allowed them to see a historical commonality across music that they often boiled down to a 4/4 rhythm and twisted in every possible sonic direction.

More than robots, they acted like wizards, conjuring up new sounds by throwing their best samples into a cauldron that spit back novel concoctions. There’s a magic to their mixing, a magic that informed the myth that would build around them for years to come, inspiring Pharrell Williams’ theory that they are actually aliens and a whole website dedicated to documenting their careers.

“Homework” meant something new at the turn of the millennium, signaling how pop music could be punk, techno, funk and disco all at the same time, thanks to the new technologies musicians had at their disposal. As the pioneers of a new form of electronic music, Daft Punk’s “Homework” represents a manifesto laying out every potential future for pop music in decades to come. Daft Punk understood new generations needed music that hopped between genres and embraced diversity, developing a sound of sundries that would inspire everyone who picked up “Homework” from their local record shop and listened to its entrancing 75-minute musical maelstrom.

Contact Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer at [email protected] .

• Around the World
• Guy Manuel de Homem-Christo
• Homework (25th Anniversary Edition)
• Julian Casablancas
• My bloody valentine
• POP Magazine
• The Beach Boys
• the strokes
• Thomas Bangalter

Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer is a senior double-majoring in journalism and cinema studies. He has written for Le Cinéma Club and ScreenSlate, as well as programmed...

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Homework is the debut studio album by French electronic music duo Daft Punk , released on 17 January 1997 with Virgin Records . Homework' s success brought worldwide attention to French house music. According to The Village Voice , the album revived house music and departed from the Eurodance formula. The duo produced the tracks without plans to release an album. After working on projects that were intended to be separate singles over five months, they considered the material good enough for an album.

Commercially successful, Homework appeared in 14 national charts, peaking at number 150 on the United States Billboard 200 and at number 37 on the Australian Albums Chart. By February 2001, the album had sold more than two million copies worldwide and received several gold and platinum certifications. Overall Homework received positive critical response. The album features singles that had a significant impact in the French house and global dance music scenes. These include the US Billboard Hot Dance/Club Play number-one singles " Da Funk " and " Around the World ", the latter of which reached number 61 on the Billboard Hot 100.

• 1 Recording history
• 2 Structure
• 3 Track listing
• 4 References

Recording history [ ]

In 1993, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo presented a demo to Stuart Macmillan of Slam at a rave in EuroDisney. The contents of the cassette eventually saw release on the single " The New Wave ", which was released on April 11, 1994 on Slam's Soma Quality Recordings label. The record also contained the final mix of the track "The New Wave" entitled "Alive".

" Da Funk " and " Rollin' & Scratchin' " were released as a single under the Soma label in 1995. The tracks were then utilized by The Chemical Brothers in DJ sets at The Heavenly Social in London. During the same year, Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons requested that the duo remix their single "Life Is Sweet" and open for The Chemical Brothers' tour in the United Kingdom. The ensuing popularity of Daft Punk's singles led to their signing with Virgin Records in September 1996. Their departure from Soma was noted by Richard Brown of the Glasgow-based label. "We were obviously sad to lose them to Virgin but they had the chance to go big, which they wanted, and it's not very often that a band has that chance after two singles. We're happy for them."

Although Virgin held exclusive distribution rights over Daft Punk’s material, the duo remain the owners of their master recordings through the Daft Trax label. Bangalter expressed that "To be free, we had to be in control. To be in control, we had to finance what we were doing ourselves. The main idea was to be free." [7] Daft Punk discussed their method with Spike Jonze , director of the "Da Funk" music video. He noted that "They were doing everything based on how they wanted to do it. As opposed to, 'oh we got signed to this record company, we gotta use their plan.' They wanted to make sure they never had to do anything that would make them feel bummed on making music." In regards to the duo's creative control and freedom, Bangalter said:

Daft Punk worked to record other tracks, including " Revolution 909 " and " Around the World ". The album was mixed and recorded in their own studio, Daft House in Paris , France. It was mastered by Nilesh Patel at the London studio The Exchange.

Virgin re-released "Da Funk" with the B-side " Musique " in 1996, before the debut of Homework . Bangalter later stated that the B-side "was never intended to be on the album, and in fact, 'Da Funk' as a single has sold more units than Homework , so more people own it anyways than they would if it had been on the album. It is basically used to make the single a double-feature."

Structure [ ]

Daft Punk produced the tracks included in Homework without a plan to release an album. Bangalter stated, "It was supposed to be just a load of singles. But we did so many tracks over a period of five months that we realized that we had a good album." [1] The duo set the order of the tracks to cover the four sides of a two-disc vinyl LP. [2] De Homem-Christo remarked, "There was no intended theme because all the tracks were recorded before we arranged the sequence of the album. The idea was to make the songs better by arranging them the way we did; to make it more even as an album." [2] The name Homework , Bangalter explained, relates to "the fact that we made the record at home, very cheaply, very quickly, and spontaneously, trying to do cool stuff." [3]

"Daftendirekt" is an excerpt of a live performance recorded at the first I Love Techno party in Ghent, Belgium. [4] It served as the introduction to Daft Punk's live shows and was used to begin the album. [2] Janet Jackson sampled "Daftendirekt" on her song "So Much Betta", which was included in her tenth studio album, Discipline , in 2008. [5] Homework' s following track, "WDPK 83.7 FM", is a tribute to FM radio in the US. [6] The next song, " Revolution 909 " is a reflection on the French government's stance on dance music. [2] [7]

"Revolution 909" is followed by " Da Funk ", which carries elements of funk and acid music. [8] According to Andrew Asch of the Boca Raton News , the song's composition "relies on a bouncy funk guitar to communicate its message of dumb fun." [9] Bangalter expressed that "Da Funk"'s theme involved the introduction of a simple, unusual element that becomes acceptable and moving over time. [10] Sal Cinquemani of Slant Magazine complimented the song as "unrelenting", [11] and Bob Gajarsky of Westnet called it "a beautiful meeting of Chic (circa "Good Times", sans vocals) and the 90s form of electronica." [12] The song appeared on the soundtrack for the 1997 film The Saint and was placed at number 18 on Pitchfork Media's "Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s" list. [13] "Phoenix" combines elements of gospel music and house music. [2] The duo considered "Fresh" to be breezy and light with a comical structure. [14] Ian Mathers of Stylus Magazine criticized the song, stating that it "doesn’t feel like the beach just because of the lapping waves heard in the background." [15]

The single " Around the World " carries influences of Gershon Kingsley 's hit "Popcorn". [8] Its music video was directed by the Academy Award-winning French filmmaker Michel Gondry, who compared the track's bassline to that of "Good Times" by Chic. [16] Chris Power of BBC Music named it "one of the decade’s catchiest singles". He stated that it was "a perfect example of Daft Punk’s sound at its most accessible: a post-disco boogie bassline, a minimalist sprinkling of synthetic keyboard melody and a single, naggingly insistent hook." [17] Ian Mathers of Stylus Magazine commented that "there is no way you’d want to have a Homework without 'Around The World'." [15] The track "Teachers" is a tribute to several of Daft Punk's house music influences, including future collaborators Romanthony , DJ Sneak and Todd Edwards . [18] The song "Oh Yeah" features DJ Deelat and DJ Crabbe. "Indo Silver Club" features a sample of "Hot Shot" by Karen Young . [4] Prior to its inclusion on Homework , "Indo Silver Club" was released as a single on the Soma Quality Recordings label in two parts. [19] The single lacked an artist credit in the packaging [19] and was thought to have been created by the nonexistent producers Indo Silver Club. [20] The final track, "Funk Ad", is a reversed clip of "Da Funk". [2]

Track listing

References [ ]

• ↑ James (2003), p. 269.
• ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 Warner, Jennifer. "Interview with Daft Punk" . p. 3. DMA . About.com . Retrieved on 30 March 2007.
• ↑ Nickson, Chris (June 1997) Daft Punk: Parlez-vous da funk? . CMJ New Music Monthly (46) (CMJ Network) p. 10. ISSN 1074-6978 . Retrieved 31 January 2013.
• ↑ 4.0 4.1 Homework ( liner notes ). Daft Punk . Virgin Records , a division of EMI Group . 42609. 1997.
• ↑ Discipline (Booklet). Janet Jackson . Island Records , a division of [[wikipedia:The Island Def Jam Music Group]|The Island Def Jam Music Group]]. 2008.
• ↑ Di Perna, Alan (April 2001). "We Are The Robots", Pulse! . pp. 65–69.
• ↑ Warner, Jennifer. "Interview with Daft Punk" . p. 2. DMA . About.com . Retrieved on 10 February 2012.
• ↑ 8.0 8.1 Collin, Matthew (August 1997). "Do You Think You Can Hide From Stardom?" . Mixmag . Retrieved on 6 March 2007.
• ↑ Asch, Andrew (18 December 1997). "Daft Punk smashes charts with simplicity" . Boca Raton News . Retrieved on 1 May 2012.
• ↑ Daft Punk audio commentary for "Da Funk" music video , The Work of Director Spike Jonze (2003).
• ↑ Cinquemani, Sal (2 November 2002). "Daft Punk – Homework" . Slant Magazine . Retrieved on 1 May 2012.
• ↑ Gajarsky, Bob (28 April 1997). "Daft Punk, Homework" . Westnet. Retrieved on 1 May 2012.
• ↑ Ryan Dombal (3 September 2009). "Staff Lists: The Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s: 20-01" . Pitchfork Media . Retrieved on 10 February 2012.
• ↑ D.A.F.T.: A Story About Dogs, Androids, Firemen and Tomatoes . Virgin Records. 1999.
• ↑ 15.0 15.1 Mathers, Ian (9 May 2005). "Daft Punk: Homework – Playing God" . Stylus Magazine . Retrieved on 1 May 2012.
• ↑ Gondry, Michel (2003). The Work of Director Michel Gondry companion book. Palm Pictures . Retrieved on 4 May 2012.
• ↑ Power, Chris (5 January 2010). "Review of Daft Punk – Homework" . BBC Music . British Broadcasting Corporation . Retrieved on 1 May 2012.
• ↑ Gill, Chris (1 May 2001). ROBOPOP . Remix Magazine . Archived from the original on 11 February 2012. Retrieved 18 February 2012.
• ↑ 19.0 19.1 Indo Silver Club (liner notes). Daft Punk. Soma Quality Recordings. SOMA 035.
• ↑ Silcott, Mireille (3 April 1997). "Personality punks" . Montreal Mirror . Archived from the original on 6 June 2011. Retrieved on 3 August 2011.

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Daft Punk – Homework (25th Anniversary Edition Review)

Released as a surprise drop one year to the day since the duo announced their separation, the 25th Anniversary edition of Daft Punk’s debut album Homework , reintroduces audiences to the duo’s early work which kickstarted their critically acclaimed and award-winning discography.

While those more familiar with Daft Punk’s funk and disco based music from Random Access Memories as well as recent collaborations with The Weeknd with ‘Starboy’ and ‘I Feel It Coming’, Homework brings harder hitting electronic music which helped push French House and electronic music into the mainstream inspiring later artists such as Justice, Disclosure and Porter Robinson amongst many others.

The House classic, ‘Around The World’, is certainly the biggest single from this album and still remains on rotation for many 25 years later, however, relistening to Homework, gives opportunity to re-appreciate some of Daft Punk’s lesser known and underrated tracks. Tracks such as ‘Phoenix’ with its thumping kick and humming beat as well as ‘Indo Silver Club’ with its bouncing drum beat and melody, are both underrated upbeat and joyfully addictive house tracks.

Harder and more techno inspired tracks such as ‘Rollin’ & Scratchin’ and ‘Rock’n Roll’, illustrate the eclectic ability of Daft Punk to make both hard hitting techno and funk and disco inspired house. Those harder hitting tracks however may not be the tracks listeners have on repeat for casual listening, rather playing a much stronger role within Daft Punk’s highly recommended live albums, Alive 1997 and Alive 2007 .

To celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the original release of Homework, an additional fifteen remixes of songs from the original album have been added to this release. Some of those are fresh unheard remix such as Master at Works’ low tempo and relaxing ‘Around The World – Mellow Mix’, while others are releases of deeper cut remixes which accompanied the original single releases of tracks such as ‘Burnin- Ian Pooley Cut up Mix’ and ‘Revolution 909- Roger Sanchez & Junior Sanchez Remix’. While these remixes are a welcome addition for Daft Punk fans, with eight of the fifteen being remixes of ‘Around the World’ and four being remixes of ‘Burnin’, the 25th Anniversary feels like a missed opportunity. Including  early limited released material such as the Soma Records published singles, ‘Assault’, which was released in the lead up to Homework, and the unreleased 1994 single ‘Drive’ would give listeners music previously unavailable on streaming services, and make the album a must listen.

The release was accompanied by a twitch stream of 1997 Concert from the Mayan Theater in Los Angeles from Daft Punk’s Daftendirektour as well as a vinyl reissue of the live album, Alive 1997 . For those new to Daft Punk’s older work, this new 25th Anniversary  release of Homework certainly worth their time. For Daft Punk fans who are very familiar with Homework , their time would perhaps be better spent relistening to Alive 1997 or seeking out other recordings of Daft Punk’s live concerts.

Homework remains a strong release that should  be regarded as highly as Daft Punk’s later albums, Discovery, Human After All and Random Access Memories . The vinyl release of  this 25th Anniversary edition, coming on the 15th April will be a worthwhile collectors item for Daft Punk fans as it compiles alternative versions of classics that could previously only be available within the now hard to find single releases. The re-release is available for streaming now and is a classic album worth revisiting for any dance and electronic music fans.

Ben Stewart

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Daft Punk's ‘Homework’ and ‘Discovery’ were recorded in Thomas Bangalter's bedroom

Both albums were mixed and recorded using a JVC boombox that Bangalter had been given for his 11th birthday

• Becky Buckle
• 11 August 2023

Thomas Bangalter has revealed that pivotal Daft Punk records ‘Homework’ and ‘Discovery were recorded in his bedroom.

Theories have circulated for many years over whether the pair's debut, and second album respectively, had been recorded in one of their bedrooms — a theory that has been been confirmed as true by Bangalter.

In an interview with Matt Everitt, on his podcast, The First Time… Bangalter was questioned: “The myth is that ‘Homework’ was all in your bedroom, is that true?”

Read this next: Thomas Bangalter explains the real reason for Daft Punk's split

In which he replied: “It’s true, ‘Homework’ and ‘Discovery’ were done in the bedroom, in the same flat as I was watching Modern Times and we had [Stevie Wonder album] ‘Songs in the Key of Life’ constantly on the turntables.

"In this small bedroom, my parents had given me this small boombox for my 11th birthday, a JVC boombox with a little graphic equaliser, and I kept this thing.”

He adds: “One day when we plugged in a few keyboards and samplers, I found that boombox and I put it on the stack of machines. And that little boombox is what we mixed and recorded both ‘Homework’ and ‘Discovery’ on. That was the magic one.”

‘Homework’ was released in 1997 whilst ‘Discovery’ came years later in 2001 with Mixmag describing it at the time as "the perfect non-pop pop album" and claiming the duo had "altered the course of dance music for the second time" within the April 2001 issue.

Read this next: An interview with Daniel Vangarde, dad of Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter

This new interview with Bangalter also covers topics such as the origins of the electronic duo as well as what the future holds for him.

Also discussing music, Bangalter plays tracks from the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Paul Williams, Stevie Wonder and more.

Listen to the full podcast episode here .

Becky Buckle is Mixmag's Multimedia Editor, follow her on Twitter

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Music Features

What does daft punk leave behind.

Andrew Flanagan

On Monday, the ur-French-dance-music duo Daft Punk announced – via the slick and typically cryptic video above, featuring a dramatic self-destruct sequence – that it was hanging up the helmets and leather jackets for good.

The pair, born Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, began making music in the early '90s, raving through that effervescent decade and leaving it, with the release of Homework in 1997, in a blissed-neon glow. Over the next 10 years – most notably with Discovery in 2001, a legacy-cementing tour in 2007 and the mystique-enhancing break they left in-between (not to mention all that came after) – Bangalter and Homem-Christo became the steel-and-silicon giants they'd wished themselves into being, while unwittingly setting the stage for a different type of machine altogether.

Daft Punk's music is and always will be formidable, but the roots and future of its legacy aren't yet crystal clear. NPR Music asked a few experts to consider what the two did for them personally, and what that might mean for the history books.

It all started in the Midwest

It's easy to equate Daft Punk with disco loops – like all good crate-diggers, as they aged they leaned heavily into exploring the lineage of where their samples had come from. But when I think of Daft Punk I always think of Chicago house in the '90s, the pair's adulation of which was no secret. "Teachers," track nine on their 1997 debut Homework , is a spoken incantation of influences that name-checks Midwest greats like Paul Johnson , DJ Sneak , DJ Rush , Romanthony and DJ Deeon – Black and brown artists who didn't have Daft Punk-sized budgets, DJs that may have gotten their flowers in the underground, but are definitely at risk of being forgotten in successive waves of digitalism and cultural Coachella-fication. Just as Berlin had a special bond with Detroit techno, Paris and Daft Punk developed a unique relationship with Chicago, applying chic filters, rock distortion and high-gloss mastering to the city's unctuously loopy disco house, squealing acid and raw stripped-back jack trax. This became the "French touch" sound, with Daft Punk at the center: Guy-Manuel with his Crydamoure label and Thomas Bangalter via Roulé records and Stardust, his collaboration with fellow DJ Alan Braxe (which yielded 1998's inescapable dancefloor sing-along, "Music Sounds Better With You").

At some point, Daft Punk became more than the sum of their parts – actually, they became robots, with a giant f***-off stage show, highly stylized movie-length videos and Grammy trophies. They weren't for me anymore – they were for everybody. It wasn't about twirling on the dance floor at Chicago's Route 66 roller-rink, a sea of phat pants and Polo caps erupting into a cheer as the first squelchy, cartoon notes of "Da Funk" hit the mix. Daft Punk was now at the grocery store, the gym, the festival, on TV. I didn't love them any less – their Alive 2007 show at Coney Island's Keyspan Park was one of the best live electronic music shows I've ever seen – but I listened to them less purposefully, absorbing them in the atmosphere the way one does pop music.

Younger artists excited me, as they amplified fragments of Daft Punk's vision into whole other styles. Longtime Daft Punk manager Pedro Winter explored a hundred juicy tangents of the duo's sound with his Ed Banger label: Justice, picking up where "Robot Rock" left off, took rock distortion in electronic to the nth degree; Sebastian and Feadz leaned into dramatic effects and sample cuts; Kavinsky's '80s keyboard obsession (and Drive soundtrack) almost single-handedly started synth wave. Fellow Parisian label Institubes explored a Punk-esque mix of avant-garde ideas and ghetto house, while Berliner Boys Noize is still artfully applying the duo's mixing and compression techniques as he surfs big waves of cheeky-yet-raw European house.

Yet most of the Daft Punk clips surfacing right now are their least stylized; they're more about [ Ed: As in, this entire article, I suppose... ] how the group (and especially their live performances) made people feel. One of the most popular is a YouTube clip of a very young Daft Punk playing live at Wisconsin rave Even Further in 1996 – a reminder that no matter how many "Get Lucky"'s they might have made in the future, somewhere in there they're still two kids tweaking drum machines relentlessly in the middle of the night. It doesn't matter if Daft Punk disbands or not because that essence never dies. Daft Punk forever. – Vivian Host is a journalist, DJ/producer and host of the Rave to the Grave podcast. She loves berry pie, Sharpies and giant speaker stacks.

The notion that Daft Punk were once underground dance music "populists" hasn't aged well — the underground isn't associated with many Grammys for best album, and most anti-elitist notions have taken a decidedly right-wing turn in our collective consciousness. But at the time of the duo's legendary 2007 Alive tour, their aspirations to build a bigger dance tent, while deprogramming mainstream dancing biases — the residue of both the "disco sucks" era and the boom-bap '90s defeat of house and techno as commercial genres — felt mass revolutionary in the best ways. The tour also came on the heels of an era when culturally conservative reactions to the racially and sexually mixed club scene saw raves illegalized by the feds, and popular dance spots shut down in city after gentrifying American city. Before the myth that "Daft Punk's pyramid changed everything" would end up propping up Coachella, EDM, the live dance market as a whole and much of non-hip-hop-related pop, dance music needed larger-than-life champions, and at that moment, les robots Francais consciously embraced the role.

That embrace manifested itself in one unlikely, but perfect, creative choice: the stage walk-on music for the American Alive shows: Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out For a Hero," from the 1984 Kevin Bacon film Footloose . "Hero" is Bonnie Tyler and Meat Loaf producer Jim Steinman's follow-up to "Total Eclipse of the Heart," a personification of over-indulged, synth-driven orchestral '80s cheese, yet also the kind of overt, emotional pop that made sense for a French act which had embraced disco's big, hook-filled gestures.

Aesthetically, it stood out like a sore thumb, welcoming a crowd made up of not only the die-hards but those who just wanted to find the best party. As an anthemic earworm from a soundtrack that spawned numerous hits, "Hero" was pop-spotting 101, an invitation to even the most culturally unhip helping Daft Punk pack minor league baseball stadiums and festival headline spots. More pointed was the song's source, a B movie about a Chicago high school kid that loves to dance, whose move to a conservative small town which has banned dancing sees him rebel and start a youthful uprising. Footloose was based on the laws of the very real Elmore, Okla., but Daft Punk was into liberation on a greater scale. "Holding Out For a Hero" wouldn't have worked as well as it did, had what followed not boldly lived up to the fight. – Piotr Orlov lives in Brooklyn, and writes regularly at Dada Strain .

"Digital Love"

My golden Daft Punk memory is not witnessing their 1996 U.S. debut at a muddy Wisconsin rave, or meeting the duo at their home-from-home in the Hollywood Hills in 2013. It's dancing to "Digital Love" with my two-year-old son in 2001, the year Discovery came out. The childhood link – if not my own, then my kid's – cuts to the core of Daft Punk. As hinted by the title itself, Discovery felt like a flashback to pop's primal scene: those first encounters, ears cupped to a transistor radio or eyes glued to the TV screen, with otherworldly transmissions from Planet Pop. A magical recovery of that pre-teen openness to everything, before you've learned the rules of cool and uncool.

On Discovery , Daft Punk took their existing filter-disco sound, as explained on tracks like "Musique," and blended in a palette of textures and tones sourced in 1970s radio rock at its most overground, overproduced and over-lit. This was the yacht-rock move, almost a decade ahead of chillwave or groups like Haim. But in Daft Punk's case, the balance of irony and awe leans far more to the latter. There's a transcendent artificiality to "Digital Love" especially, a splendor of sound at once camp and sublime. The hazy glaze of the filter effect on the twirling main riff is like plastic if it could rust. At the breakdown, Supertramp's keyboard sound is duplicated with eerie exactness (or not so eerie exactness, given that Daft Punk used the exact same Wurlitzer piano as the English soft rock group). Then there's the ridiculous majesty of that Van Halen-style guitar solo, frothing and bubbling over like a geyser of hot-pink liquid latex. Yet, within all the delicious knowing allusions, the heart of "Digital Love" aches with unrequited longing: it's a rewrite of "Jump" tilted to the tentative, whose last words implore "why don't you play the game?"

"Digital Love" is such an epic distillation of What Daft Punk Is All About that it's still slightly bemusing to remember it was the third single off Discovery and only a modest hit. Admittedly, on the album "Digital Love" jostles with rival delights: lead single "One More Time," with its astonishingly protracted minute-and-half breakdown during which the beat absconds leaving just Romanthony's Auto-Tune-crackling ecstasy; the baroque excess of "Aerodynamic"; frantic electro-funk bangers "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" and "Crescendolls"; the shimmering 10cc homage "Nightvision" and bittersweet ballad "Something About Us"; "Veridis Quo", which sounds like the credits theme for a French movie about a lonely girl who's just moved to Paris.

Fans photographed on the eve of Daft Punk's album launch, held in the tiny Australian town of Wee Waa, on May 17, 2013. Shanna Whan/AFP/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Fans photographed on the eve of Daft Punk's album launch, held in the tiny Australian town of Wee Waa, on May 17, 2013.

Still, "Digital Love" is The One as far as I'm concerned: a wondrous fusion of disco, AOR, glam metal and New Wave (the choppy guitar-riff breakdown practically forces you to dance in jumpy formation like you're in a Toni Basil video). The actual promo for "Digital Love", like its precursor singles, was hewn from Daft Punk's anime movie Interstella 5555 , a project that captured an abiding truth about pop as well as forecasting its emerging destiny in the 21st century: pop's pulpy essence has far more to do with cartoons, comics and video games than literature or the other high arts.

Of course, in a move that seems in hindsight both logical and fatal, Daft Punk fell out of "digital love." They abandoned sampling and embarked upon the back-to-analogue quest of Random Access Memories : an attempt to turn back time and resurrect the pop monoculture of the late '70s and early '80s, ruled by performers and producers like Chic, Giorgio Moroder and Michael Jackson. RAM was a conceptual and commercial triumph, but ultimately a dead end – where on Earth could the duo go next? How could they hope to top "Get Lucky" being on the radio each and every hour for an entire year, the six Grammys and the awards ceremony jam session with Stevie Wonder and Nile Rodgers? As a commentary on our atemporal and digitally-overdriven epoch, RAM provided a heaping portion of food-for-thought. But since it came out, I've never once felt the urge to play the record. Whereas "Digital Love" and Discovery are perennial, always there when I need an intravenous jolt of insta-joy. Happy daze. – Simon Reynolds is the author of Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture and operates a number of blogs centered around Blissblog .

Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem and Leiji Matsumoto

To me, Daft Punk lives most vividly in the early aughts — more specifically, in the liminal space between Cartoon Network's Toonami and Adult Swim and in the late hours when they would air reruns of older programs. It was there that I first saw Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem in parts, which I'd later find out would form the whole of a playful animated film the duo created, in collaboration with manga artist Leiji Matsumoto and director Kazuhisa Takenouchi. Set to their second record, Discovery , the movie features a band of interstellar performers, designed in the familiar style of Matsumoto's work and other popular 1970s sci-fi anime, with their long limbs, sideburns and big, dramatic eyes.

As kids, Thomas Bangalter and Guy Manuel de Homem-Christo had watched Captain Harlock , one of Matsumoto's beloved works. The titular character's image – his mysterious one-eyed gaze, the skull detailing on his outfit and his wine glass – stayed with them. Captain Harlock was a hero that found his place in the stars. In many ways, Daft Punk did, too. There's a chivalrous air that persists in Interstella , as there was in Captain Harlock , that locks you into the lightness and romance of their retrofuturism. It's fitting, then, that Discovery is the album where Daft Punk finds inspiration in the past's popular sounds.

"It was as if spacemen or androids had arrived from outer space," Matsumoto said, recalling his first encounter with Daft Punk. It may have looked like that — with the duo decked out in suits and their robot heads — but the encounter was closer to young boys meeting their childhood idol. Meanwhile, Matsumoto loved French films growing up. Perhaps this is what leveled the field in the making of Interstella , which has no dialogue and very little in the way of sound effects. Image and sound are set up in a perpetual trust fall, but rather than recreating risk, they seek to recreate childlike joy. – Alex Ramos is an artist, writer and NPR Music's editorial intern.

Scotland slows down to "Da Funk"

In 1995, I was resident DJ at Pure in Edinburgh – probably one of the wildest clubs to ever exist. Perceived by many as a techno club, myself and Andy, my co-DJ, were always trying to shatter people's preconceived notions as to what could and should play inside the club.

One barrier that was particularly hard to tear down was the one constructed around tempo: Any time I dropped the tempo below 120 beats per minute, I was guaranteed to be on the receiving end of a lot of moans and groans. Then "Da Funk" came out. It was as if tempo absolutism instantly melted away. "Da Funk" had all the energy and power the dancefloor demanded, but it was that groove , combined with the incessant earworm of a riff that gave it instant anthem status.

I think the fact that "Da Funk" initially came out on Soma, a Scottish label, meant that this was one of the first parts of the world where they were ecstatically embraced. Ultimately I feel "Da Funk" helped point a way forward for me to contemplate the possibility of running a club night beyond the confines of genre or tempo rigidity. – JD Twitch .

So long, and thanks for all the bros

You can distill the arc of 21st-century dance music, from niche concern to billion-dollar industry, into one 75-minute DJ set, which doubles as my favorite Daft Punk record. Alive 2007 , and the 18-month world tour in which it was recorded, is the ultimate "you had to be there, man" concert experience of this century so far; I wasn't. (I have like three regrets in life, and that's No. 2.) Only, in a way, you didn't have to be there: 10 seconds in, as "Robot Rock" stutters to a start and the crowd explodes, you close your eyes and you basically are. Back then, I'd watch YouTube footage from the tour and feel as if I was on drugs, and on the occasion I was on drugs, I felt as though I was in heaven (God, as it turned out, was not just a DJ, but two of them).

The Alive tour and its recording opened the floodgates for dance music as mass culture, which is cool in theory and fairly disastrous in practice — a Pandora's box for all sorts of soulless industry cash-grabs and stupid pyrotechnics. What makes Daft Punk's legacy so relevant, I think, is that it wasn't the inherently positive force it had seemed to be circa Alive 2007 , when bands sold their guitars and bought turntables and the DJ became the new rock star. There's an argument that it was exactly the formulaic computer music Daft Punk inadvertently inspired which prompted their analogue turn on Random Access Memories , released at the peak of EDM oversaturation: "Whoops, sorry we laid the foundation for an empire of s***. Here's our million-dollar oldies record. Peace out!" Looking back, maybe Alive 2007 did more harm than good. When I press play, I couldn't care less. – Meaghan Garvey is a writer and artist from Chicago.

Robots before, and after, all

Tron: Legacy was always a sci-fi blockbuster best understood as a silent film. Apart from Jeff Bridges' opening monologue as Kevin Flynn, taking us back to the arcade game's first spark of creation, little needs to be said in the sequel, set decades after the original. From a motorcycle chase on Earth to lightcycle races, gravity-defying battles and flying ships within Tron , there's a visual vocabulary to this digital fantasia: dark shadows are lit in neon stripes, as bodies boldly stride, fight and glare with a pre-talkie flair. Even Bridges, master of dude-ly understatement, announces his quiet presence with demonstrative volume.

In the Tron universe, The Grid was developed offline, away from and before the Internet's pervasive influence on the outside world; likewise, Daft Punk scored a digital frontier of its own making. The duo spent two years composing, arranging and orchestrating with Joseph Trapanese, blurring the line between synths and strings, but also deepening their symphonic relationship. The quickening strings of "Outlands" mimic a taut synthesizer sequence. "The Game Has Changed" charges the arena with a mix of organic and digital drums that push up against glitching bombast. "Derezzed," the soundtrack's only single, whizzes with an unlocked character's energy — we see Daft Punk on screen, as they play themselves up as party DJs for underworld extravagance. Even in tender moments of reflection, there's harmonic nuance: unease for an unknown world, but also a euphoric embrace for its possibility. How many nights have I drifted asleep to Tron: Legacy only to be awoken by the overture's stirring motif, rebuilt as a club banger for the closing credits? Bio-digital jazz, man. – Lars Gotrich is a producer and resident Viking at NPR Music.

On becoming a helmet

Music has no shortage of enigmas and recluses, operating quietly and in contrast to artists who live perpetually online or otherwise actively seek the spotlight. Coming from dance music's sweaty underground and no doubt informed by the so-called "faceless" techno tradition of acts like Underground Resistance, Daft Punk always fit best in the former category. Giving scarcely few interviews as their career took them from electronic music favorites to chrome-domed idols, and almost never showing their faces, their notoriety grew with their near-anonymous public image as, well, robots.

While many artists employ pseudonyms to showcase their work, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo took the concept to another level after the modest-yet-significant success of 1997's Homework , an eclectic album that clearly conveyed admiration for their diverse influences. By Discovery , a full-throated house music homage, they donned helmets as conjoined cybernetic identities, adding depth to the mystique. Aided by a vague sci-fi backstory, the immersion afforded to the duo by their custom, instantly signature masks obliterated the fact that we knew their real names and their roots in the Parisian DJ scene. This facade allured and repelled to different degrees, drawing curious listeners in while maintaining a certain distance from the artists themselves.

Daft Punk, performing on Oct. 27, 2007 in Las Vegas. Karl Walter/Getty Images hide caption

Daft Punk, performing on Oct. 27, 2007 in Las Vegas.

These android personas allowed for a kind of world building, both in virtual and physical spaces, where Daft Punk could create without the messiness of human expectations or interaction. Like with the recently departed emcee MF DOOM, who famously sent imposters to play some of his live shows, one could never be entirely certain that the pair on stage or on screen was, in fact, the real deal or a couple of stand-ins. Even when lending their technical skills to the formidable likes of Kanye West and The Weeknd, artists who presently spend no shortage of time in public-facing capacities, Daft Punk held onto their automatonic asceticism. When they scored one of the biggest hits of the 2000s with "Get Lucky," they stayed in muted character as highly visible collaborators Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers pantomimed the boogie in its music video.

Seeing Daft Punk as robots, committing to the fantasy on both ends of the experiential transaction, enhanced the listening experience. Though the aesthetic insularity of the underrated gem Human After All perhaps best captures that ethos, the far more popular Random Access Memories came across like an aggressively learning A.I., the connections with legends Giorgio Moroder and Paul Williams feeling like technological advancement rather than a divergence from the mission's directives. Even as they borrowed, often wholesale, from the disco and funk crates across the discography, their use of vocoder and other vocal tools kept fans vested in the moment and the myth. – Gary Suarez is a freelance music critic and journalist born, raised, and based in New York City.

Daft Punk to Host One-Time-Only Stream of 1997 Helmetless Show

• By Jon Blistein

Jon Blistein

Daft Punk will celebrate the 25th anniversary of their debut album, Homework , by releasing a deluxe edition of the album and hosting a one-time-only livestream of a 1997 concert. Both the deluxe edition and the livestream will drop today, 2/22/2022 at — fittingly — at 2:22 p.m. PT (that’s the less numerically-pleasing time of 5:22 p.m. on the East Coast).

The livestream will take place on Twitch , where Daft Punk will share footage from their Dec. 12, 1997 show at the Mayan Theater in Los Angeles. The gig came at the tail end of the duo’s “Daftendirektour” world tour in support of Homework , with Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter playing the entire set without their signature helmets.  

Meanwhile, the deluxe edition of Homework arriving today will feature a slew of remixes, nine of which were previously unavailable on streaming services. The new-to-DSP remixes are pretty much all alternate versions of the Homework classic, “Around the World,” including versions by DJ Sneak, house legend Todd Terry (“Tee’s Frozen Sun Mix”), and the American garage house duo Kenlou. The deluxe edition also includes remixes of “Revolution 909,” “Burnin’,” and “Teachers.”

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On top of the deluxe edition of Homework , Daft Punk will be reissuing the album — as well as their live LP, Alive ’97 — on vinyl. Pre-orders for both releases are up on Daft Punk’s website and Amazon.com .

While Homework technically came out Jan. 20, 1997 , the decision to start the 25th anniversary celebration over a month later isn’t as strange as it seems. One year ago today, Daft Punk announced they were breaking up after 28 years together.

Homework  25th Anniversary Edition Track List

Disc 1: Homework – Original Album 1. “Daftendirekt” 2. “WDPK 83.7 FM” 3. “Revolution 909” 4. “Da Funk” 5. “Phoenix” 6. “Fresh” 7. “Around The World” 8. “Rollin’ & Scratchin'” 9. “Teachers” 10. “High Fidelity” 11. “Rock’n Roll” 12. “Oh Yeah” 13. “Burnin'” 14. “Indo Silver Club” 15. “Alive” 16. “Funk Ad”

Disc 2: Homework Remixes 1. “Around The World” (I:Cube remix)* 2. “Revolution 909” (Roger Sanchez & Junior Sanchez Remix) 3. “Around the World” (Tee’s Frozen Sun Mix)* 4. “Around the World” (Mellow Mix)* 5. “Burnin'” (DJ Sneak Main Mix)* 6. “Around the World” (Kenlou Mix)* 7. “Burnin’” (Ian Pooley cut up mix) 8. “Around The World” (Motorbass Vice Mix) 9. “Around The World” (M.A.W. Remix)* 10. “Burnin'” (Slam mix) 11. “Around The World” (Original Lead Only)* 12. “Burnin'” (DJ Sneak Mongowarrier Mix)* 13. “Around The World” (Raw Dub)* 14. “Teachers” (extended mix) 15. “Revolution 909” (Revolution A Capella)

*not previously on streaming services

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THE STORIES BEHIND THE MUSIC

“We spent a lot of time making everything perfect…” The story behind the cover artwork for Daft Punk’s ‘Homework’

On this day (20 January) in 1997, French duo Daft Punk released Homework , their devastating, disco-funk infused debut, which would go on to be one of the most influential albums in electronic music history.

The recording of Homework was a straightforward process, as the group’s Thomas Bangalter told CMJ New Music Monthly in 1997 – “we made the record at home, very cheaply, very quickly, and spontaneously, trying to do cool stuff” .

But when it came time to package the collection of tracks into an album, the group were a bit more methodical, as artist and movie producer Nicolas Hidiroglou , who photographed both the album’s sleek black cover and inner sleeve, tells 909originals.

Over to you, Nicolas.

“ I had been working with a number of artists, and I was working with The Face and other magazines at the time,” he tells 909originals. “ A friend said to me there’s a new band called Daft Punk that is putting together an album, you should check them out.

“I had already done some work with Virgin Records, and Daft Punk had already done a few things with Virgin; compilations with other, more established artists. The public didn’t know them at this stage, but there was a buzz about them. They were just teenagers at the time.”

Hidiroglou was thus invited to meet the duo in and listen to the demo Homework for the first time.

“It sounded so different, and completely new,” he says. “I had never heard anything like it – that mix of disco and funk. They played the vinyl for me in this little room; I had no idea I was listening to history.

“ I remember Thomas was very sure about what was going to happen – Daft Punk were going to tour in the UK, and tour America. They were very sure of themselves, and how everything was going to work out.”

Both Bangalter and compatriot Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo (who had previously designed the now-famous Daft Punk logo) had an idea of what they wanted for the album’s cover and inner sleeve.

“We spent about a week putting it together,” Hidiroglou recalls. “They wanted to try out a number of different fabrics before they found exactly what they wanted – the black satin. We spent a lot of time making everything perfect.

“With the inside cover, that had been all arranged by Thomas at his home. I went to his house and met his father – who had been a big producer in the past – and we went up to Thomas’ room. He had prepared everything on the desk just as it appears on the album.

“It was the first time for me to meet an artist who had so much visibility of what they wanted and where they wanted to be. They knew they would be big, but perhaps not as quickly as it worked out. It took just a few months.”

Following on from the release of Homework (as well as some side work for Bangalter’s side labels Roulé and Scratché), Hidiroglou was again called upon to take some promotional shots of the group.

“I had a little shop close to the Sacré-Cœur , and we shot lots of press pictures in the basement. Thomas did some ‘Daft Punk’ graffiti tags on the wall, so I shot that, and I also took some photos of the two of them.

“Back then, they already had the idea of covering their faces – this was a few years before the ‘robots’ – as they didn’t want to be well-known like other artists. We tried different solutions, putting things on their faces, wearing masks, things like that.

“For me, this was not a big thing – I had worked with lots of famous people, and was used to requests like this. But I remember when Daft Punk became famous, people spoke badly about it – people thought they were ‘too proud’ to show their faces. But really, it was them trying something new.”

While fame came quickly for Daft Punk outside of France, in their home country the duo remained “pretty underground for the first year”, Hidiroglou explains. “People didn’t really see the significance of what they were doing, even music people.

“I didn’t think the cover of Homework was a big project for me at the time, but now, it has appeared in a lot of books and magazines. Today it’s seen as a ‘reference point’, but when I did it, I did’t see the significance of it.

“I still meet Thomas sometimes, he lives close to my house. It’s more a friendly relationship now, as opposed to a business relationship.”

[lyte id=’mmi60Bd4jSs’ /]

[This article was originally published in 2019 . Thanks to Nicolas for the interview. You can view his portfolio of work, which includes photography for a series of international artists, actors and musicians, at hidiro.com ]

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Daft Punk's Homework turns 25: discover the gear and production techniques behind the sound

1999 interview confirms a love of Roland gear and an ingenious workflow

Hard to believe, but it's exactly 25 years since Daft Punk released Homework, their seminal debut album. Hugely influential, this was a record that helped to revive house music, and inspired a generation of producers to start talking about 909s and 303s.

5 tracks producers need to hear by... Daft Punk

Which brings us to a rare and revealing interview that the duo gave to a Japanese magazine way back in 1999 , two years after the release of Homework.

In it, the band - Thomas Bangaleter and Guy-Manuel De Homen-Christo - discuss their gear setup and production methods. As you’d expect, they were heavy users of Roland ’s TR drum machines and TB-303 BassLine synth , while sampling was taken care of by models from big-hitters of the time such as Akai and E-MU, with the latter company’s SP1200 a notable studio presence.

Daft Punk’s early love affair with Roland gear, meanwhile (let’s not forget that Homework even goes so far as to feature a track called Revolution 909 ; the drum machine that was allegedly used to create it  went up for sale in 2017 ) is further illustrated by their ownership of a Juno-106 , MC-202 and MKS-80 .

Despite speculation that the lead sound from Da Funk was created using a Korg MS-20, there's no mention of it on this list.

Effects-wise, it comes as no surprise to see the Alesis 3630 on the kit list - this was a staple of F rench touch production at the time - and the same company’s Microverb II is there as well. The duo had further processing hardware from Behringer , LA Audio, Waldorf and Yamaha .

The Secret DJ on why bands split, and why we shouldn't mourn the end of Daft Punk

When it came to recording, Thomas Bangaleter explained that sounds were sent through their mixer (a Mackie MS1202) and compressor to the DAT machine (a Panasonic SV-3700), with MIDI sequencing being taken care of by a Mac running Emagic’s MicroLogic (a pre- Apple , entry-level version of Logic that was available at the time).  

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Following some effects processing, sounds from the DAT were then sent to a Roland S-760 sampler to be spliced up, before these bits and pieces were sequenced from the Mac and finished tracks recorded back to the DAT.

It’s all a world away from the joined-up, in-the-box music production world we live in today; Daft Punk were still using zip drives back then, a very ‘90s storage solution. However, many would argue that the relatively primitive nature of their setup was what gave their early music its charm, and that, as technology has given us more creative options, something else has been lost.

Further reading

If you want to dig a little deeper into the Daft Punk Homework synth sound, check out Reverb Machine's excellent article , which features superb remakes of Da Funk and Around The World, all created in software. 

I’m the Deputy Editor of MusicRadar, having worked on the site since its launch in 2007. I previously spent eight years working on our sister magazine, Computer Music. I’ve been playing the piano, gigging in bands and failing to finish tracks at home for more than 30 years, 24 of which I’ve also spent writing about music and the ever-changing technology used to make it. 

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Finally managed to get the '97 1st Pressing Homework LP!!!