Daft Punk

100 Best Albums

Essential Albums

  • Discovery
    Discovery
    Discovery

    100 Best Albums There’s a video that Daft Punk made to promote 2001’s Discovery in which the French duo, wearing their famous robot helmets, dance on the Tokyo subway. Some riders smile and stare, while others look politely away. At the time, Daft Punk were big enough business to dismiss goofing off—their first album, 1997’s Homework, had already sold two million copies. And yet, when asked about Discovery’s turn toward ’70s and ’80s pop, Thomas Bangalter said the goal wasn’t to evoke a specific sound or era, but the raw wonder they’d felt encountering that music as children. Dancing on the subway in a city where they didn’t speak the language, liberated from judgement and self-criticism: It’s all there in the title. The album’s biggest singles—“One More Time”, “Harder Better Faster Stronger”, “Digital Love”—were as useful to wedding DJs as they were to pop philosophers. And the rest—the faux-metal guitars of “Aerodynamic”, the sci-fi daydream of “Veridis Quo”, the UK garage showcase of Todd Edwards on “Face to Face”—glimpsed down dozens of stylistic alleyways without disrupting the album’s course. “Electronic music”—a term that always suggested the future, however vague—was demonstrated to be as familiar and comforting as classic rock, and no less real in its depth of feeling. You can easily trace Discovery forward to EDM and the continuing entwinement of techno and rock. But you can also trace it back to The Beatles circa Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or The Beach Boys circa Pet Sounds and Smile: music that took pop seriously as art, but also recontextualised older, seemingly uncool styles in ways that felt progressive and fresh. Most of all, though, Daft Punk wanted to be universal. And as implausible as it may have seemed for two French men in robot helmets, Discovery got them there. “We hope all the kids will love the video,” a disembodied voice says near the end of the promo clip. “As well as their parents.”

  • Homework (25th Anniversary Edition)
    Homework (25th Anniversary Edition)
    Homework (25th Anniversary Edition)

    Few records combine sonic innovation with veneration for what came before as succinctly as Daft Punk’s 1997 debut, Homework. The title itself implies this duality: It’s a reference to both the bedroom studio where musicians Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo recorded their early house and techno productions, and a nod to the older artists the duo studied in preparation for their dance music breakthrough. Many of those musical ancestors are name-checked on the Homework track “Teachers”, on which Bangalter and Homem-Christo salute the (mostly) electronic music producers and DJs who inspired their work. That includes plenty of semi-obscure Chicago house music heroes and Detroit and UK techno champions, many of whom predated Daft Punk by a decade—but who were still active in the late-1990s rave scene. By tagging their peers, the members of Daft Punk were expressing solidarity with the many BIPOC artists whom they’d obsessed over for years. It was a declaration of belonging that could have come off as appropriation, had Homework not so fully elevated the genre. Bangalter and Homem-Christo might wear their influences on their sleeve, but their music transcends mere tribute; it’s some of the most unforgettable hook-laden house and techno ever put to wax. When it comes to the dance floor, if a record’s hot, that record is hot. And DJs across the globe pumped Homework’s 16 tracks, which included everything from playful filtered disco (“Revolution 909”) to throttling acid techno (“Rollin’ & Scratchin’”). Meanwhile, radio jocks and MTV programmers on the lookout for format-friendly versions of popular rave sounds swooned over Homework cuts like “Da Funk” and “Around the World”, which became breakout hits, thanks to inventive videos directed, respectively, by Spike Jonez and Michel Gondry. That near-impossible confluence of talent and timing allowed Homework to achieve its position atop every list of 1990s electronic music. As time went on, the members of Daft Punk would prove themselves worthy of every accolade Homework received as they continued to evolve from students to teachers to masters—elevating the state of electronic music every step of the way.

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About Daft Punk

Daft Punk may pretend to be robots—the members’ gleaming cyborg helmets are among the most recognisable silhouettes in modern music—but it’s the French duo’s warm, clearly human hearts that make them so beloved. Few acts have done as much to translate electronic music’s sometimes arcane pleasures to pop’s broadly universal contours. Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter met in school and played briefly in rock band Darlin’ with future Phoenix member Laurent Brancowitz. Shortly after, in 1993, the two regrouped as Daft Punk, trading their guitars for synths and samplers, and paying homage to the silky, hypnotic thump of Chicago house. The duo’s innovation was to take the wriggly, rough-hewn style—a descendent of disco, rooted in Black and queer communities in America’s cities—and sand down its edges, giving looped funk basslines both sensuous heft and Gallic panache. Such sound sculpture helped give birth to French Touch, a wildly influential production style whose luxe detailing continues to resonate through dance music decades later. But Daft Punk didn’t linger on its creation; its next two albums, 2001’s Discovery and 2005’s Human After All, largely abandoned house and disco in favour of audacious sample flips from obscure ’70s rock and funk—and minted a fair number of classics in the process. With songs like “One More Time,” Daft Punk proved its unrivalled ear for a platinum hook; a cut like “Robot Rock”, meanwhile, was pure alchemy, turning a forgotten hard-rock obscurity into an unforgettable anthem. Not only did Daft Punk help popularise electronic music, but their legendary 2006 Coachella performance from inside a neon pyramid helped set the stage for EDM’s turn toward hi-def spectacle in the 2010s. Yet once again, even as the culture was trending in one direction, the duo feinted left: Its 2013 album, Random Access Memories, released at the height of the EDM boom, all but abandoned obvious digital trappings in favour of slinky organic disco played by real human musicians. Daft Punk introduced Italo icon Giorgio Moroder to a new generation that hadn’t even been born by his ’70s heyday, helping kick off the decade’s disco revival; with Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers, it came up with the joyful, effervescent “Get Lucky”, a song so effortlessly delectable that hearing it for the first time was like being reacquainted with a childhood friend. What’s remarkable is that it’s just as powerful on the umpteenth listen. In 2021, the duo announced its breakup after 28 years together, but that has hardly meant the end of the Daft Punk story. A 10th-anniversary edition of Random Access Memories came with 35 minutes of unreleased music. Also, in 2023, a Random Access Memories (Drumless Edition) offered a new iteration on the group’s final studio album. For these robots, it seems, shutting down the operating system is never final.

ORIGIN
Paris, France
FORMED
1993
GENRE
Dance

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