It’s been a long time since the end of a band (not marked by death) felt so significant. In my head, the end of the White Stripes and LCD Soundsystem were the last two that left some kind of lasting impressions. There was sadness when those two groups called it quits, more so than any others that I can recall over the last twenty years, and while I guess I it’s been a long time since I thought of Daft Punk as an active band, it still marks the end of a significant era.
Thinking back on the group’s nearly thirty year history, it’s impressive to think of what they accomplished before the internet truly made them legends and how their rise to fame felt cinematic and special. Find me an album with a better opening run of songs than 2001’s Discovery and one that had more impact on a genre in the last twenty years. Each of the album’s first four tracks are absolute anthems on their own and when sequenced on the record, it immediately begs the question of what must have been pulsing through those helmets during those recording sessions. Four songs that would become ubiquitous with techno, house, rave, and electronic, and four songs that would spark the movement of EDM and alter the course of popular music in a new century. This was Daft Punk at the height of their career, but the monolithic robots didn’t suddenly emerge at the top of their game. Their career had a start like many others and their transformation from unknown DJs to the music world’s most famous robots is worth the trip down memory lane.
Before they were they were pulverizing beats as the rockin’ robots, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo were two kids looking to play music with their friends. They started a band and called it Darlin, dropped a few tracks, but after a less than enthusiastic review in the press, they called it quits. Some of their bandmates went on to start another pretty successful group you might know called Phoenix, but Thomas and Guy-Manuel weren’t ready for the synth-pop rock and roll flair of their former band members and instead, picked up some samplers and headed to the clubs. In those early days, they weren’t rocking their trademark robot looks quite yet, but they managed to create enough of a commotion to gain a following and decided that whoever called their Darlin track “nothing but a bunch of daft, punk music” might actually be on to something.
Their debut, Homework, dropped in 1997 right when big tent energy rave music was soaring to new heights over in the States and the duo started to make a name for themselves. 2001’s Discovery feels like such a momentous record in retrospect, but at the time, it wasn’t heralded with the same regard as its legacy may suggest and, despite naming it the third best album of the 2000s, Pitchfork’s original review did sort of reduce them to humans after all.
A few years later and a few things would change. LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy wrote a song called “Daft Punk is Playing at My House” to use as the lead single for his band’s debut album and the robots themselves played Coachella in 2006 in support of the album no one talks about, Human After All. Now, at this time, Coachella was not the destination vacation, multi-weekend extravaganza it is today, but you could argue that Daft Punk were what changed all of that. In 2006, they introduced their infamous pyramid stage set-up to an unsuspecting crowd and they played in a non-headlining spot in a TENT. The idea of Daft Punk playing anything other than a mind-altering main stage headline experience seems impossible, but in 2006, they used this moment and changed music festival history forever. After Murphy introduced Daft Punk to the rock kids at CBGB and word began to trickle out about this festival in the desert, the legend was born. 2007 saw the unveiling of their new “Alive” tour that would take the pyramid show around the world and bring rave music back to the mainstream.
Even with their influence at a new, all-time high, Daft Punk would continue to defy logic. For the last decade of the group’s illustrious career, they became more of a digital folklore story as much as they were a band. Rumors constantly swirled about when they’d show up again and if there’d ever be a new album. On a seemingly random night in 2010, they answered part of that question as they reunited with their old friends in Phoenix and sent New York City’s Madison Square Garden into an all out euphoric combustion when they made a surprise appearance during the band’s headlining CMJ show. Pitchfork would go on to call it the best Phoenix concert of all time and as someone who was lucky enough to witness it in person, seeing the robots rise from the stage and begin to dazzle the arena with an epic rendition of “Around the World” before jamming with their hosts on a live remix of “1901,” well it’s a moment I will never forget.
Although they would never tour again and it would still be a few more years before they unveiled Random Access Memories, one of the most elaborately recorded albums of all-time, the digital love and following would never die. Even as recently as this year’s Super Bowl the internet buzzed with suspicion that there could be a chance we’d get lucky and see the robots one more time with their rather frequent (for them) collaborator, the Weeknd. Alas, even for a group who has spent years behind masks, wearing gloves, and keeping their distance, the timing just wasn’t right.
Awaking to the news that Daft Punk had officially called it quits was a harsh Monday morning surprise in a year that has been full of terrible realities. Still, the ripple effect that swept the internet (can you imagine the parties we’d be having this week if any one of their songs came on at a bar or club?) felt universal. Fans of all kinds of music seemed immediately heartbroken by a band that had been pretty much entirely inactive for close to a decade. Over the course of the day, tributes and thank you messages flooded the internet and people began to post their favorite tracks, memories, videos, and any other Daft Punk story that they could think to share. It feels like the biggest musical loss since the deaths of David Bowie and Prince and for one generation, it may be their biggest loss yet.
Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo were always doing it right and gave life back to their music. May we all now just lose ourselves to dance, forever.