Why is daft punk so good

Electronic music started playing in American house parties and then clubs, and eventually, the stage was set for a the genre to be acceptable and, from to , dominant. Have they done it? All the while, Daft Punk faded into the background, but never left front of mind. They appeared briefly in to conjure the Tron: Legacy soundtrack.

Then they started working on a new and apparently final album. The product of those sessions, Random Access Memories, is cinematic and grandiose -- and by their standards, organic-sounding, a major departure from the heavy synth sounds of Human After All and Alive It took people by surprise, but it should not have: Daft Punk gave birth to the trend, but they were never enslaved to it.

Though the public took time to catch up to Human After All , they embraced Random Access Memories in real time: The set received rave reviews and chart-topping sales, while the Pharrell-sung lead single "Get Lucky" became an era-defining global smash, peaking at No.

Daft Punk would get to take a victory lap at the Grammys, where they performed with Pharrell, Rodgers and Stevie Wonder, and took home four trophies, including record of the year for "Get Lucky" and album of the year for RAM.

Take a minute to watch the clip where the duo hug before getting on stage to accept the latter award. They can't talk, but every moment of their rise -- from bedroom producers to larger-than-life icons -- is right there in that embrace.

Daft Punk never toured behind the album, but everyone did some silly math and figured they'd hit the road again in They never said they would, and they never said they wouldn't, and when they didn't -- even after they popped up alongside The Weeknd for a pair of pop smashes from his Starboy album, resulting in their lone Hot No.

We'd all kind of held on to this idea that they had to come back. They had to do something more, one more time. It feels a little weird, thinking of Daft Punk in the past tense. Bangalter and Homem-Christo are only in their mids. Maybe it was just time to let everyone know, they're moving on. They've said what they have to say — without saying almost anything at all.

We don't know why they're calling it, and indeed, hopeful skeptics are conjecturing that this announcement is simply a red herring to set the stage for an actual comeback. But for now, at least, it seems it's really over. We may know a lot about Daft Punk, but we don't know what they're thinking. However, we should all know and recognize by now that Daft Punk owes us nothing -- because they already gave us everything, and that's not a bad deal at all.

Search term. Billboard Pro Subscribe Sign In. Top Artists. Top Charts. Hot Songs. Billboard Top Videos. It was like a door that opened onto more doors. Daft Punk lay at the center of their own universe, popularizing dance music to audiences who may not have cared, while still maintaining their roots in underground dance scenes that scorned outside approval.

In the two-thousands, their manager, Pedro Winter, branched off to found the Paris label Ed Banger Records, which expanded the Daft Punk diaspora, pushing dance music toward a kind of head-banging excess. The film and the soundtrack were both underwhelming, and it suggested to me that Daft Punk were never as futuristic as they were deeply, earnestly nostalgic. Maybe the fact that they aspired to make albums at all, rather than transcendent singles, like most dance producers, spoke to their age.

Are they actually retired? It seems beside the point, given how intermittent their output has been over the past few years, as well as the fact that we never really knew them to begin with. There are few times when we are all listening to the same thing; usually it means someone has died. The draw of such moments is amplified by the pandemic. Even if Daft Punk remained unknowable, their music offered a vision of social life, whether it was the sounds of crowds, the samples chopped up and braided together, the tributes to their teachers.

The music was irresistibly obnoxious and sleazy, which fit the stories he brought back. But, objectively, Human After All has none of the lush quality and gilded sound design of Discovery.

And nor could it: a record dashed off in six weeks will almost certainly not have the same sonic breadth as one made over two and a half years. So this step down happened by design. Why would Daft Punk do this? Why create a record that broke so sharply with all they had achieved on Discovery? You could, perhaps, put it down to the understandable desire to do something different after the success of their second album, to branch out into ugly duckling new territory.

Would Human After All need such venom if the band were merely changing direction? The theory runs that Daft Punk were so utterly overwhelmed by the success of their first two albums that they set out to produce a follow up that would take them down a commercial notch or two. This seems far too contrived to be true. Speaking to Anthem, Bangalter suggested that he and Guy-Man were not entirely in control of the direction their music took.

We never try to go against that or against that process. The decision to record Human After All quickly and to create something very different to Discovery may have been conscious choices, then. But they do not necessarily equate to self-sabotage. Could this weight have led to a subconscious desire to escape from Discovery and everything it entailed?

It would have been understandable if so. And, in a way, it worked. The feverish expectation around the band dropped, and Daft Punk started with a tabula rasa. Nobody really knew what the band were going to do and, in all honesty, not all that many people cared. Human After All was like a prescribed burn, the farmer torching their field so that new crops might grow; it allowed Daft Punk to breathe again. In becoming the anti-Discovery, Human After All only lent weight to its illustrious predecessor.

And for that, we can only be thankful. Buy it here. October 4, Words : Chandler Shortlidge. October 4, We use cookies on this website to ensure the best possible user experience. By clicking 'Yes, I agree' or continue to use this website by navigating to another page you are agreeing to our use of cookies. Cookie settings Yes, i agree! Close Privacy Overview This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website.

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