daft punk interview homework

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Daft punk released 'homework' twenty-years ago today and they've rarely sounded as exciting since.

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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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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.

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THE STORIES BEHIND THE MUSIC

Daft Punk’s ‘Homework’ – the story behind the album’s iconic cover

On 20 January 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 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 explains. “ 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. I saw Guy-Man a month ago. It’s more a friendly relationship now, as opposed to a business relationship.”

[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 ]

Read more : From disco to D.I.S.C.O. – how Thomas Bangalter’s dad helped set the Daft Punk template

For all the latest news on techno, house, and rave culture, features on the hottest nightclubs and interviews with the world’s best DJs, make sure 909originals is your go-to source.  www.909originals.com

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Washington Square News

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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Daft Punk Reissuing Homework on Vinyl, Livestreamed Rare 1997 Concert

By Jazz Monroe

Today, on the first anniversary of their breakup , Daft Punk are airing a one-off stream of a rare 1997 concert, recorded before they began wearing helmets. It’s happening right now on Twitch . This is not a drill! Go watch it now or forever hold your peace. Find the stream here . Update: Sorry, you missed your shot, the stream is over.

The livestream footage came from a set that Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter played at Los Angeles nightclub the Mayan around the Homework release. A representative stressed that the show will air only once, and that’s exactly what happened.

The duo has also announced a vinyl reissue of its landmark debut album, Homework , for its 25th anniversary. The Homework vinyl LP and a vinyl reissue of Alive ’97 are out April 15. Homework (25th Anniversary Edition) , which will also get released digitally, includes numerous remixes. Find the tracklist below.

Daft Punk called it quits a year ago today, eight years after releasing their final album, Random Access Memories . Read Pitchfork’s 2013 feature with the duo and the Sunday Review of Homework .

All products featured on Pitchfork are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Homework (25th Anniversary Edition) :

Disc 1: Homework – Original Album: 01 Daftendirekt 02 WDPK 83.7 FM 03 Revolution 909 04 Da Funk 05 Phoenix 06 Fresh 07 Around the World 08 Rollin’ & Scratchin’ 09 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: 01 Around the World (I:Cube Remix) 02 Revolution 909 (Roger Sanchez & Junior Sanchez Remix) 03 Around the World (Tee’s Frozen Sun Mix) 04 Around the World (Mellow Mix) 05 Burnin' (DJ Sneak Main Mix) 06 Around the World (Kenlou Mix) 07 Burnin’ (Ian Pooley Cut Up Mix) 08 Around the World (Motorbass Vice Mix) 09 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)

This article was originally published on Tuesday, February 22 at 5:10 p.m. Eastern. It was last updated on Wednesday, February 23 at 10:22 a.m. Eastern.

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Daft Punk: 'Maybe when we were 16, rock was OK' – a classic interview from the vaults

Good Times by Chic. One Nation Under a Groove by Funkadelic. 1999 by Prince . Blue Monday by New Order. Groove Is in the Heart by Deee-Lite. Da Funk by Daft Punk. Around the World by Daft Punk. Get the picture?

TAXI DRIVER

We've just left LA's Boss Nova, Daft Punk's beat still pulsing in our heads like a metronome that won't quit. Our cab driver is mean-looking, close-cropped, looking askance at the crowd of LA ravers milling about, as if wishing, like De Niro, for a real rain to fall.

"Where you just been?"

Err, to see Daft Punk. They're sort of a French techno band and …

"Daft Punk? I love them!" He brightens up.

You're into techno?

"Sure! Twelve years. Ever since I was in the military. Daft Punk were on! I can't believe I missed them!"

And we spend the next 20 minutes discussing Orbital with Travis Bickle...

THE BRITISH ARE COMING! (OH, AND THE FRENCH …)

American white rock is dead. Everyone knows it. The varnished zombies going through their croaky cod-grunge motions on MTV know it. Ironically, Kurt Cobain is more alive now than any of these clueless combos will ever be. The big first-wave surfers of post-punk US rock – Rollins, Sonic Youth, REM – are still around, but not going any place. The second wave of post-88 grunge died away with Nirvana. And the third wave, the Offsprings, the Green Days, the No Doubts, have the outer garb and posturings of teen rebels but are clearly as much the visual projection of record-company board meetings as the characters in any Coca-Cola or Nike ad campaign.

MTV know the game is up, too. Which is why they're in the process of ditching spade-loads of their 120 Minutes leftfield coverage and courting the new wave of what they've cutely termed "electronica". Go into Virgin Megastore on LA's Sunset Strip and display-stand after display-stand is blaring the wares of the Chemical Brothers, the Prodigy, Underworld, even Morcheeba. Et, bien sur, Daft Punk.

A few years ago, this wouldn't have happened. Primal Scream cut Screamadelica , their seminal 1991 rock/funk/dub monsterpiece, and the Stone Roses were rolling on the back of the baggy, trippy Fool's Gold. Both created enormous waves over here; Guy-Manuel De Homen Christo describes Screamadelica as an inspirational album for Daft Punk: "One of the albums first to set off an explosion in our heads."

In the States, mainstream rock journos dismissed them as "typical English hairdresser disco" – caught up in hidebound notions of "authentic" music being something that composed solely of T-shirts, long hair, guitars, "real" songs and cool goatees.

Now that whole lumberjack nonsense has gone timber, and so Daft Punk are here in LA, a big drone in the general buzz about imported dance. They're DJing at the after-show to the premier of The Saint (which is being pushed massively on every billboard and, of course, features Orbital on the soundtrack) and playing the Boss Nova, one of a number of techno/rave clubs now dotted about the West Coast.

They've been put up at the Argyll – a huge, grey, chic, art-deco hotel that sits, serene and incongruous on the Sunset Strip opposite the legendary Hyatt, facing down the hill with a view of skyscrapers and smog to kill for. It's the hotel of most people's dreams. Daft Punk, however, aren't looking too goggle-eyed.

"It's very nice, but … pfff," says Thomas Bangalter, making one of those ineffable French noises that express infinite shades of frustration. "If it had been up to us, we would have stayed in some little sleazy motel, y'know, out of town. Some place with atmosphere. That would have been more us."

Here's what we know about Daft Punk. 1. They met when aged 12 and 13 and formed their first group, Darlin', in their mid-teens, a lo-fi guitary outfit who were trying to follow the English anyone-can-do-it basement DIY aesthetic, putting out one of their own tracks in 1992 on a compilation on Stereolab's Duophonic label.

2. A Maker review of said track lambasted it as "Daft Punk". Having already decided to ditch guitars, they sarcastically leapt on the insult and took it as their name, sowing the seeds of future confusion. "We love playing around with labels," says Thomas.

3. Daft Punk don't have management as such. They have a "mate", who helps them out, a go-between. When Virgin France need to liaise with the band, they have to trawl the likeliest Parisian cafes and bars to track down said mate.

4. Thomas's father, Daniel Bangalter, wrote the 70s daft-disco hit D.I.S.C.O. and the Gibson Brothers' Cuba. Yet the group disclaim any influence on the part of this pop parent.

5. Guy-Manuel De Homen Christo is, as his name would suggest, rumoured to be of aristocratic stock. His ancestors may well have ridden at force against Henry V at Agincourt.

6. Daft Punk dismiss all such idle speculation about their backgrounds as entirely irrelevant. They have no desire to be gawped at like pop icons – hence their ubiquitous masks.

7. They're said to be surly, defensive and uncommunicative.

SURLY? NOUS?

First impressions of the duo go some way to dispelling this last point. They're accompanied by Cedric, their road manager, a rather glum and stubbly string bean of a fellow, but Thomas is chatty to a fault and the taciturn Guy, who in previous interviews has sat back with the menacing and silent air of Oddjob in Goldfinger, bustles in with interjections of his own. Mind you, given that most interviews start out asking them what it's like to be the French Chemical Brothers, it's not surprising that they clam up a bit. Daft Punk are nothing like the Chemical Brothers. They lack the Chemicals' rocky, serious-as-cancer pyromania. If they're like anybody, in spirit it's Kraftwerk.

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Their almost Eurovisionary insistence on the big, banal boom-boomabang approach to the backbeat, their silly vocoders, their synth wah-wahs and jingly chants might seem as simple as tick-tock, mere French naivety. But, much as Kraftwerk infuriated the hippies with their disingenuous paeans to new technology, Daft Punk infuriate many dance purists with their avowed intention to be heard by as many people as possible, their declared love of kitsch icons such as Barry Manilow and their unabashed love of dumb pop. "We just don't tell lies," says Guy. "We liked Barry Manilow when we were younger. Too many bands want to look cool, they won't admit what they really liked. We like everything; we don't care."

Thomas: "Of course, when the album came out on Virgin the underground people were saying: 'Oh no, a major label, it's the end of the world, it's all over for Daft Punk as an authentic thing.' We hate that. For us, we make music to share with people. There might be some artists who say: 'I only want to be heard by 1,000 people maximum,' but only very few."

But Daft Punk are a clever tease. Bear with them and their lo-fi house backbeat unfolds as subtly as systems music becomes not an irritant but a trance, taking you from plastic to primal in easy stages. Around the World, the new single, is a classic case in point. When I first heard it, it seemed too repetitive, too silly. Now barely an hour goes by without it dancing through my head, from ear to ear, like a techno pied piper. The video, too, is similarly, meaninglessly transfixing, with mummies, bathing belles, headshrunk bodypoppers and robot-dancing astronauts performing a sort of Busby Berkeley number. As Spinal Tap once observed, there's a fine line between clever and stupid – and Daft Punk dance it beautifully.

(AT LAST) THE FUTURE IS HERE

Five years ago, Daft Punk would have been America's worst nightmare. Do they really think they can crack the States now?

Thomas: "Sure. It's big in the UK, getting big in Europe and it can be in the States, maybe because people are bored with grunge bands. There's so many of them, all the same, all bad. Even if it's good, it's not original."

"All the good rock stuff has already been done," snorts Guy.

Of course, we've heard all this before. Guitars out, samplers in; rock out, dance in. The harbingers of doom have been sniping thus since about 1981, and over 16 years on the rock guitar has refused to wither away. Even now it's hard to see the Great European Electronica Invasion, or whatever, making much headway in the mid-West. The Rolling Stones will still be swelling stadia into their 70s and in a few months' time, millions will be gathering together to hear Oasis, the last vast outpost of trad-indie rock, singing along to every word like dance never happened.

Yet things are changing. For new bands, there are economic factors to consider.

"Today, it's possible to make a record in your bedroom at a cheap price," says Thomas. "Our album, Homework, is cheaper than nearly any rock album. No studio expenses, producers, engineers. We're not saying there is a right way or wrong way to go about things, but this is certainly a way.

"When we started to make music, we were just trying to form the teenage band everyone wants to be in. Back then, a sampler was much more expensive than a guitar. Now, they're cheaper."

What's more, there's a feeling that with the onset of the Internet mobile phones, mobiles, faxes, the digital age just around the corner and computers upon us that the future has finally arrived. Bleeps and sequencers are the soundtrack to life. Thomas leaps in enthusiastically.

"Sure, and the net makes things more accessible, too. You can have the same access on a small site as a big site. You can sell records without leaving your bedroom, and you don't need a set of big producers. You won't need to go knocking on the doors of record companies, or A&R people or magazines with piles of tapes they never listen to …"

Steady on. All this is in danger of putting me out of a job.

F*** THE FRONT NATIONALE

Strange, but when you list the pioneers and groundbreakers of electronic music since the 70s, you'll find they're nearly all European. Kraftwerk. DAF. Giorgio Moroder. Yello. Front 242. Liaisons Dangereuses.

Thomas considers the point.

"I think even with Kraftwerk, it's like people playing ping-pong with America – from Dusseldorf to Detroit, y'know? But in France, all we have are the regular discotheques. There is no real club culture.

"Which is why the government is so against it," interjects Guy. "They don't know what it can be – they just think of evil and drugs."

What do the French make of Daft Punk?

"They hate us," spits Thomas. "Take Les Inrockuptibles , the biggest French rock magazine. They had a big piece on us, calling us cheesy, mainstream stuff. We did a four-page interview with this magazine. The editor was always telling us: 'Yeah, we're really excited about Daft Punk, it's great a French success at last.' But then he went away and heard us properly and hated it so he insisted on the magazine carrying a bad review."

Daft Punk early on felt a disenchantment with the French underground scene – lots of studenty types in black hanging around listening with cool passivity to imported indie.

"Maybe when we were 16 and at gigs, Dinosaur Jr, Primal Scream, rock was OK," remembers Thomas, a wise elder of 22. "But then at 17, we looked around and thought, What is the point of these guys, doing nothing? The gigs were full of people doing nothing and we felt we were wasting our time, so young, in this kind of place. It's sad that we are from France and the worst review we've ever had is in a French magazine."

Given that the country appointed a Minister for Rock , it's strange that France has made such a pitiful contribution to pop and rock culture. It's a bit like the Germans having a Minister for Comedy. Only with the rap explosion led by the likes of MC Solaar a few years back did they break their duck.

"The problem in France is there is no structure," explains Thomas. "Sure, there was a Minister for Rock, but the worst thing for kids is for the government to get involved in rock. We don't have this scene of magazines, venues – not like London, with gigs all week. In France, there are maybe three or four venues."

Depressingly, Daft Punk emerge from France at a time when the country is lurching frighteningly to the right. Jean Marie Le Pen's evil, racist, anti-Semitic Front Nationale command over 10% of the vote. In the south of the country, they even have overall control of certain local councils and were instrumental, at an administrative level, for the jailing of two members of French rap crew NTM for performing a F*** Tha Police type song.

In a sense, France now is how England was just after punk in the 70s, when the British National Front was so worryingly prominent that the Anti-Nazi League was set up specifically to block it, with a whole welter of newly politically conscious post-punk bands backing the ANL up with vocal support and benefit gigs.

Daft Punk certainly have strong feelings about the Fascist scum poisoning their home country, but despair at the prospect of a similar movement galvanising the youth of France.

Thomas: "It's hard to move people, especially as they are becoming more right-wing. The amount of young people who voted for Chirac was incredible. He presented this easy solution and it was depressing to see how they were fooled by his speeches. He was only interested in becoming President, not changing things. The problem with people is that they expect the Government to bring solutions. And the Front Nationale is an even more radical version of that."

FACELESS, NOT MINDLESS

Daft Punk's insistence on wearing masks is more than a gimmick; it's connected with their determination not just to add to the rows and rows of pop icons, faces here today and gone tomorrow.

Guy: "It's OK, but once you've seen three or four pictures of these guys, it gets very boring. Also, it's one of the rules, and we want to break rules." Does it worry you when people say that Daft Punk are THE dance band to listen to this year? Implying that you've got a 12-month shelf life?

Thomas throws up his arms in despair: "What can we do about it? Since the beginning, we're trying to do our thing, not showing our face, showing we can do it with just music, that the music can be popular, not us."

"And, of course, there's been this big hype, but we don't care about anything," growls Guy. "Things are growing BECAUSE we don't care. And, if next year there's another Daft Punk, fine, good for them. We'll stop when we stop making good music."

Thomas: "The most embarrassing part of the hype was all this stuff about the bidding war, the rumours about Daft Punk, and all this expectation and people saying they've heard the album's good but they hadn't heard it themselves yet. And then there was this: 'You MUST like Daft Punk.' And, of course, that's the last thing you want to say to people. We want them to judge for themselves."

LA got to judge Daft Punk at the Boss Nova, a rammed rave bar clearly too small to cope with the surging demand, with a queue stretching right round the corner, punters all but sawing off arms and legs and offering them to the security guards on the door in their eagerness to get in.

Merely DJing, Daft Punk start inauspiciously. They're not loud enough. The foppish LA technophiles jabber over the top, one or two exchanging glances as if to say, THIS is what the fuss is about? Then, as if by sheer cumulative attrition, the bouncing backbeat gets right inside your head, right inside your bone marrow and I'm in a roomful of hypnotised, jigging, nodding dogs, me as much as anybody.

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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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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.

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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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Daft Punk Talks Kanye West, Coachella and That Wild Pyramid Stage in Unpublished Interview

By Jonathan Cohen

Jonathan Cohen

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The groundbreaking French duo Daft Punk stunned the music world Monday morning by announcing their breakup via an elaborate video. The announcement was all the more surprisingly because the has been largely dormant since their 2013 album, “Random Access Memories,” won the Grammy for album of the year, and largely stopped performing live after their triumphant 2007 world tour. The two songs they recorded with the Weeknd on his 2016 “Starboy” album may be their last high-profile releases as Daft Punk.

However, around 15 years ago it seemed like the group might be on its last legs: Their 2005 album, “Human After All,” was considered a flop, receiving lukewarm reviews and selling barely 10% as many copies as its 2001 predecessor, “Discovery.” Plans for a long-discussed tour were shelved until Coachella came calling with a six-figure offer, allowing Daft Punk to finally realize its ambitions on the concert stage — and on that dazzling stage, the songs from “Human After All” made sense. The result was an unparalleled audiovisual spectacle unlike any that had been seen in electronic music before, with many attendees calling it the greatest concert they had ever seen, and more than one critic calling the galvanizing Coachella set the birth of EDM.

In August of 2007, the day after dazzling 12,000 fans at Keyspan Park in New York’s Coney Island, Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo doffed their robot helmets and sat for their first U.S. interview in many years. In these previously unpublished excerpts, they discuss how Coachella set the tour in motion, their plans to release a live album from the shows and what they hoped to accomplish in the years to come.

Popular on Variety

Elements of this interview appeared in Billboard in 2007; following is an edited version of the full conversation. 

Why do you think there’s been such a powerful reaction to this tour?

Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo : I think it is a combination of factors. First, it’s rare: [Normally] when you do a record, you go on tour. The “Discovery” album was quite a successful record but we didn’t tour after that. Also, I think especially in the U.S., it took some time for people to get to know the music. House music or electronic music in general was not [widely popular] in the U.S. 10 years ago, but now it is spread all over, on the radio and supermarkets. It always takes much more time for acts from outside the U.S. to be known here, even if at the time they had a lot of fans.

It’s pretty unprecedented for an electronic group to play in front of 12,000 people like you did last night at Coney Island.

Thomas Bangalter : Yeah, but we’ve been playing many sold-out shows all over America and Europe. Maybe it’s the fact that we started playing shows last year, like Coachella and in France. People got really excited about the shows, so there are more and more people coming. Overall, I think this tour will have been between half-a-million and 650,000 people watching the shows. That is definitely a lot of people, but I don’t think it is purely on the basis of us not having toured for 10 years.

Did you decide to tour based on the offers you were getting, or did you think that creatively it was time to do some shows?

Bangalter : It was a combination of both. The interesting thing was that Coachella was a big offer financially, and that triggered the ability to bring the show to the next level. We were ready to play again — we’ve never done anything for the money or tried to take economic advantage. But we have crazy ideas, and these ideas can be expensive. The ideas we had for this tour require 20 people on the road; it’s not like these big rock stars with hundreds of people. But it’s still very challenging — a lot of technology and computers and sets. Knowing that now we could do things we couldn’t do when we played in a 1,000-person venue triggered crazier ideas and the ability to make it happen.

Like what, specifically?

Bangalter : We have 15 tons of equipment, including prototypes or modified regular technology — things we’ve re-engineered. We built the custom pyramid. We set up a production company, Daft Arts, in Los Angeles, to work on [the duo’s 2006 film] “Electroma.” We really used it, in the same way we’d produce a music video, to come up with a total independent take on it. There’s a lot of troubleshooting and tech and making custom computers. We work with Ableton Live, which is really at the core of the performance right now: We have the music and the lights synced up. It really makes the robots and the personas come to life, within this universe we’ve worked on for the last 12 years.

So with all that technology, what are you actually doing up there during the concert?

Bangalter : We’re controlling the music and some of the cues with the lights. It gets technical. We have synthesizers and remote controls in the pyramid. All of the equipment is on big, large towers on the side, with Ethernet remote controls. It’s new stuff. But it’s fun, because we’ve tried to really approach it from scratch and redesign an entire rig that will allow us to do what we want to do. We want to be able to loop stuff, mash up, filter EQ and transpose. It’s a little bit chaotic. But the thing we focused on is what you get out of the show: an intense experience of music, lights and robots, with a thin line between fiction and reality. That is really the concept of this tour, which was not the concept of the stuff we were doing 10 years ago. We wanted to create an intense experience.

But if you suddenly decide, in the middle of the set, that you want to do a 15-minute version of “One More Time,” can you do that?

Bangalter : The program allows you to do it, but the show as it is right now does not. It works on a combination of music and visuals. So what we’ve worked more on is the ability to change things within certain timeframes, but we still need to move to a certain point, or to the next song. Ten years ago, we were not interested in such a visual implementation of it: It’s a total representation of what we’re trying to express, and not just an audio one. We really see it as a kind of abstract storytelling — an audio/visual revealing, from a very minimal, monochrome start to a multi-color finish.

We’ve really tried to reinterpret every song so that they connect to each other, amid this concept of mash-up. We have a very precise image of the evolution of the three albums that we did [1997’s “Homework,” 2001’s “Discovery” and “Human After All”], despite the moderate response we had for the last one. A lot of the tracks from [“Human After All”], which has not been received well by critics and maybe not by the audience, have gotten a stronger response when we play them in the show. It was really important for us to try and express that — this kind of triangle that exists between the three records. I think the tour has been successful in that way.

Kanye West’s new song “Stronger” is No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 this week. What are your thoughts on his sample of “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?”

Bangalter : We did “Harder, Better” seven years ago and then he sampled it. We had used a sample from an Edwin Birdsong’s “Cola Bottle Baby,” and he then sampled the a cappella we used. It’s a funny thing. It’s quite symptomatic of this circle of sampling and being sampled and passing it along to the next producer, all the more coming from white kids in America and France and passing it along to urban culture. We did the same thing in a different way with Busta Rhymes, who used a “Technologic” sample. We’ve always been very open-minded and excited about unexpected connections.

Did you meet Kanye?

de Homem-Christo : Yes. The song is really great and we really like it. When we met him, he was a fan as much as we are fans of his work. It was like if we had collaborated him in the studio. He was happy to see that we liked it so much. It’s not a collaboration in the studio, but the vibe of the music we do separately connected in what he did with the song. It’s really great. On the way to San Francisco, at the airport, we heard it on Power 106 in L.A. The DJ had made an edit of our song at the beginning and then it turned into his song.

What are your thoughts on the way branding has become so prevalent in dance-music culture?

Bangalter : We are part of the older generation in a way, where people were still selling millions of records. We’ve been fortunate enough to introduce our name at a time when it was maybe an easier process than now. And we’re fortunate enough to still be able to make a living and go on tour and work on experimental projects. We really tried so far to stay out of exclusive deals: “Robot Rock” was on last week’s “Entourage” and “Technologic” was in an iPod commercial. That’s just part of the culture. We don’t reject it. It can be the soundtrack for everyday life. We’re happy to be part of it. But so far, we’re not officially sponsored by a brand on an exclusive basis.

How long do you think it will be before Daft Punk releases an album or tours again?

Bangalter : That, we cannot answer. We don’t decide the release date before making the music. I think the cool thing is that we’re always trying to do something that hasn’t been done, or ultimately, that we aren’t doing ourselves yet. That’s what we felt about the film and this tour. It is challenging to get back in the studio and work with ideas we haven’t expressed before. Some ideas take time, but some just take a few weeks. So we’ll see.

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