They’d craft it all into a 75-minute longform experience: not exactly a narrative arc but definitely a journey. They’d work with their elders and inspirations - the architects of the era they were so slavishly re-creating - as well as peers just old enough to remember what radio sounded like in the late ’70s and early ’80s. They’d record live instruments in pristine analog in place of the computer-spliced distortion bombs that had dominated their 2000s output. On the grand statement album that became their one true blockbuster, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo would eschew their trusty samples at every opportunity. Though a few scattered offerings would emerge before they announced their breakup in 2021 - most notably a pair of hit collaborations with the Weeknd on 2016’s Starboy - RAM now stands as the final entry in the Daft Punk canon. They really were nearing the end, relatively speaking, but we wouldn’t learn that for quite a while. The hunger for new Daft Punk music was obviously voracious, but it wasn’t entirely clear whether another album would ever materialize, especially since they made Random Access Memories in secret. Their original score for Tron: Legacy was better received, but it wasn’t hard to imagine them making a Reznor-like transition into Hollywood in the long tail of their career. They hadn’t released a proper album since 2005’s Human After All, an awkward chapter not met with the same hosannas as their first two. On the other hand, more than a decade on from Discovery, Daft Punk seemed on the brink of becoming a legacy act. The dazzling pyramid-based stage show they brought to Coachella in 2006 turned them into one of the most legendary live acts of their generation and, perhaps to their horror, helped to launch the booming EDM-centric festival scene they were now counterprogramming. As the decade wore on, they inspired a whole ecosystem of so-called “blog house” acts and permeated the mainstream via a chart-topping Kanye West hit. 2001’s Discovery was a color-splattered big bang for 21st century dance music, infusing Daft Punk’s sound with disco, garage, and - crucially, emphatically - arena rock’s over-the-top showmanship and electrifying power. Their 1997 debut Homework helped to popularize the house offshoot known as French Touch and yielded a pair of iconic music videos from MTV auteurs Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry. Feel how you feel about that, but the fact that the Grammys awarded them with Album Of The Year for rewinding their sound by three decades is objectively hilarious.ĭaft Punk already had a formidable legacy by the dawn of 2013. Even robots, it turns out, grow up to believe that music peaked when they were young. Regardless of whether you hold up RAM as a masterful aesthetic exercise or an overrated pivot from what made this duo great, it is indisputably a document of two guys who had helped to chart the future of music turning face and planting their flag in the past. It was definitely lucrative, carrying Daft Punk to new heights of commercial success and industry adulation. Maybe the what-have-we-done apology/corrective was necessary. At the bloated peak of dial-up-modem brostep drops and Electric Daisy Carnival untz-untz excess, the French house superstars - who’d done more than most to invent bombastic stadium EDM - were now adopting the position that popular song ain’t what it used to be, a posture usually reserved for those whose own musical instincts are too calcified to be vital anymore. Released 10 years ago today, the album was Daft Punk’s tribute to their forebears, to the glory days of disco, funk, and prog - a voyage back to a time when androids were as likely to look like C-3PO as those helmets worn by our guys Thomas and Guy-Manuel. From the title to the guest list to the retro subgenres revived throughout, Random Access Memories is expressly about nostalgia. “Give Life Back To Music” is a funny name for that first track.
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