On February 22, 2021, the legendary french EDM pioneers Daft Punk announced their breakup. The duo hadn’t released a project since 2013, and while fans knew there was possibly somewhat of a rift between the two, they were hoping for one last project to top off the group’s career. Still, regardless of whether Daft Punk’s ending was satisfactory or not, they revolutionized house and electro music, and their influence on the genre will remain evident for generations to come.
While the group first formed in 1993 in Paris, the duo released their first studio album, Homework, in 1997. Since their conception 4 years prior to the album’s release, the group had been releasing singles, like “Alive” and “Da Funk”, which stirred their popularity first in France, and then internationally. After seeing this spike in notoriety, labels began to fight to get Daft Punk signed. Because of the critical acclaim of the singles Daft Punk released, it was no surprise that when they finally released Homework, it received extremely high praise from critics and fans, and brought French electronic music into the mainstream.
The next album Daft Punk would release is easily their most popular, 2001’s Discovery. Excitement for Daft Punk’s follow-up began with big singles like “One More Time,” “Digital Love,” and “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.” These singles became some of the duo’s most loved songs, focusing on themes of nostalgia, childhood, and innocence that many people gravitated towards. Compared to the sound of Homework, Discovery includes a lot more inspiration from disco and R&B combined with their classic electro sound. It peaked at number 2 on the Billboard charts in France and the United Kingdom. If there’s an album that most greatly represents Daft Punk’s legacy and influence, it would be Discovery.
In the next decade, Daft Punk largely coasted off of the popularity of their first two successful albums. They released a couple of studio albums, like 2005’s Human After All, but many speculated that the group was perhaps sacrificing their artistic integrity for money. Many people still considered them legends but doubted that they would come out with something creative or ambitious ever again. Fans didn’t think it was a good sign when they collaborated with massive names, like Kanye West or Pharrell Williams, and believed that the band would rather work with popular artists to continue their own popularity rather than make another individual studio album. The peak of their “selling-out” phase was when the two composed the soundtrack for the 2011 movie, Tron. While the soundtrack was well-received, it worried fans that the duo would never find the same innovative spark that they did in their glory days.
That all changed, though, on May 17, 2013, when Daft Punk released their first studio album in 8 years: Random Access Memories. This album was definitely a return to form for the duo, making it clear that the two had the same vision that they had in the late 90s and early 2000s, but were willing to take ambitious risks to make their music sound fantastic. The album received overwhelming amounts of positive attention and was the best comeback the group could have made.
However, little did fans know, Random Access Memories would be Daft Punk’s final project. The duo would continue to collaborate with more massive names like The Weeknd, attaching their names to chart-topping hits, but would not release anything solely made by them. While Daft Punk’s retirement was extremely sudden, and fans, myself included, wish they could have released one last “farewell” album, they still cemented themselves as legends in the electronic music scene and music history as a whole.