- Ten years since the release of Daft Punk's final album, the Grammy-winning record has lost some of its original charm, but new bonus material takes the duo's sound to enticing places.
- The song most poignant to Daft Punk fans on the tenth anniversary reissue of the duo's last album, Random Access Memories, is probably the one that arrives at the very end—a choral rendition of the original album's "Touch" that soundtracked the film announcing their disbandment in 2021. In the two years since, they've reissued their classic albums while Thomas Bangalter, the duo's more public-facing and talkative half, released a solo orchestral album. Bangalter, after two decades of cosplaying as a robot, recently admitted that the last thing that he "would want to be, in the world we live in, in 2023, is a robot."
Random Access Memories, the most human album of the helmet-wearing pair's discography, was a clever album to close the Daft Punk chapter. The record secured their spot at the top of the electronic music world and had a foothold on the pop charts, too. It was impossible to not hear or see Daft Punk around the time they released the album in 2013, and the mainstream infiltration led to Random Access Memories winning four Grammys the following year.
These achievements might have been unthinkable in 2005, when it appeared Daft Punk had fallen off track. After the career-making high of 2001's Discovery—the album that gave dance music the technicolour earworms "One More Time" and "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger"—they released Human After All, an album widely considered their worst. Critics derided it as rudimentary, repetitive and uninspiring, the antithesis of everything their previous album represented. In pale comparison to Discovery, which was made painstakingly over two years and promoted with an elaborate Leiji Matsumoto-supervised anime film, Human After All was recorded quickly in two weeks, mixed in four and released with minimal promotion.
But in 2006, a historic Coachella set (plus the ensuing tour and live album) renewed interest in the duo and helped usher in a new era of dance music. Replete with a giant gleaming pyramid and LED screens, Daft Punk's stage setup exhibited production values unprecedented at the time, and inspired a legion of big-ticket EDM artists like Skrillex. When it was time for Daft Punk's next move, the reputation they set at the California festival allowed them to announce Random Access Memories there seven years later with pop star-level fanfare.
After earning widespread recognition for their robot-like sound, the duo took an iconoclastic left turn: they embarked on a mission to recreate the kind of music that existed before the digital production and sampling techniques that made Daft Punk chart-toppers in the first place. The decision was spurred on by the challenging experience of working with an orchestra while writing the score for the 2010 film Tron: Legacy. For this next project, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo put down their machines and employed esteemed session musicians instead, plucking from a pool of dreamy collaborators that included several musicians that were revered in the '70s and '80s, such as Chic's Nile Rodgers, disco pioneer Giorgio Moroder and singer Paul Williams.
Daft Punk are beloved by multiple generations in part because of their ability to not only channel but also honour the artists that came before them. (That's what made the track "Teachers," in which they shouted out a long list of house music innovators by name, so endearing.) Random Access Memories looked towards disco, capturing the gold-plated, classy funk of Rodger's hit-making work as Chic. The music was largely recorded in famous recording studios across Los Angeles, and cost Daft Punk over one million dollars. It certainly sounded expensive, each sound polished and carefully thought-out, the mixdowns spacious and '70s-style, fit for audiophile setups. Beyond the sound, many of these songs sprawled with the endless groove that defined disco, and indulged the lengthy, extended arrangements of the genre, too.
Random Access Memories wasn't revelatory music—nor was it Daft Punk's finest work—but it would be remiss to ignore its significance within pop music history. Among the laundry list of seasoned legends on the album, it was the Pharrell Williams features "Get Lucky" and "Lose Yourself To Dance" that got the most airplay. The former couldn't be escaped at grocery stores, weddings or festival stages. It was even featured in Saturday Night Live ads.
"Get Lucky"'s sheer ubiquity made it something of an early '10s anthem, and won the group Record Of The Year at the Grammys, an honour they share with megastars like Adele and Bruno Mars. The song's bushy-tailed optimism might raise a few eyebrows if played on a dance floor today, but there was indisputable songwriting mastery in Pharell's irresistibly catchy chorus that later devolved into Daft Punk's trademark vocoder in a slippery bridge.
The album's list of collaborators also involved vocalists hand-picked from the alternative scene, giving it further edge as a pop record. On "Instant Crush," The Strokes's Julian Casablancas abandoned his deep, searing rasp for an unusually high register lightly manipulated with a vocoder effect while Panda Bear's faraway shouts on "Doin' It Right" added a pop rock touch to Daft Punk's distinctive melodies.
But the truly fascinating pockets on the album were hidden in its second half, where the duo experimented with the orchestras that eluded them previously. "Motherboard" is a masterpiece of plaintive strings and pluming flute melodies, eventually subsumed into a vortex of synth arpeggios that twinkled like stars in a clear night sky. "Beyond" might be the greatest example of the duo's aptitude for bridging eras and styles, with a climax that pulled together guitar licks, shimmering synths and Daft Punk's automata vocals.
The tenth anniversary reissue includes nine unreleased tracks, offering a taste of what a slightly less commercial version of Random Access Memories could have sounded like. Daft Punk's "GLBTM (Studio Outtakes)" strips the polish from "Give Life Back To Music," replacing it with the warm resonance of acoustic instruments, like a piano having a furious race with a guitar and clapping hands. The result is a vibrant, multi-hued disco odyssey. "Prime," labelled "unfinished," shares the same '70s influence, laced with frenetic strings and whirlpools of funky guitar. On the hazy, languorous landscape of "Horizon", isolated guitar strums are swaddled in muted keys that speckle the song like lily pads.
Daft Punk's newfound scoring sensibilities come through in the outstanding choral sections of the bonus material. The youthful falsettos of "Horizon Ouverture" levitate seraphically before the black curtain raises, revealing a mournful orchestra that ends their part too soon. The most emotional lines of the reissue, and possibly Daft Punk's catalogue, are the same ones that narrated Daft Punk's departure in their farewell video: "Home, hold on / If love is the answer / You're home, hold on." The phrase is caught in a storm of bleeping synths until all we're left with are the naked words that cut out mid-phrase.
When Random Access Memories was released in 2013, it was inescapable, the product of a massive marketing campaign and even bigger hits. But today, the record sounds trapped in a time capsule, the victim of its own lust for vintage sounds. The album is part of the reason longtime fans might be careful to profess they are old Daft Punk heads, not fair weather fans lured by the success of "Get Lucky." The songs that stand out most on this fleshed-out reissue might not have the most commercial appeal, but their inclusion underscores the brilliance hidden within Daft Punk's final album, and the extent to which the duo evolved their sound during the making of it.
トラックリスト01. Give Life Back To Music
02. The Game Of Love
03. Giorgio By Moroder
04. Within
05. Instant Crush
06. Lose Yourself To Dance
07. Touch
08. Get Lucky
09. Beyond
10. Motherboard
11. Fragments of Time
12. Doin' it right
13. Contact
14. Horizon (Japan CD)
15. GLBTM (Studio Outtakes)
16. Infinity Repeating (2013 Demo)
17. GL (Early Take)
18. Prime (2012 Unfinished)
19. LYTD (Vocoder Tests)
20. The Writing of Fragments Of Time
21. Touch (2021 Epilogue)