ARTISTS I LOVE: Daft Punk

 

I feel like this one has been a LONG time coming.

In today's blog post, I'd like to show my appreciation for French electronic music duo Daft Punk - who over the course of 28 years changed electronic music and released a string of incredible albums, each with their own unique styles which are equally appreciated not just by Daft Punk's fans, but across the world.

I first discovered the robots' incredible music when I was about ten years old, in 2019 - I had been on a huge binge of  well known electronic music artists at the time (The Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, The Prodigy, etc) and after I started getting into modern house music (most of which I can't remember now) I discovered their first album Homework, released in January 1997.

I immediately fell in love with the album - it's funk filled nature and groovy beats hooked me instantly and it introduced me to house music properly at a time when I was beginning to break out of my shell musically. My favourite tracks include High Fidelity, Teachers, Revolution 909 and Fresh.

I kept listening to this particular album for several years and it fit comfortably between various other genres over the next four years.

Over time, I began to wonder more about Daft Punk and what other work they had done over the years, and one rainy Saturday afternoon in mid May 2023, I popped the CD of their second album Discovery into my computer and was blown away.

Like Homework, the songs were catchy, groovy and wonderful to listen to, however the sonic improvements on Discovery were instantly noticeable to me, and I enjoyed every single track just as much. It was fun, nostalgic, wonderful and so, so happy. At the time, summer was approaching, and this album slotted brilliantly into my summer listening throughout. My favourite tracks include - all of them!

To add, Discovery to me felt personally like an album that I needed to hear - I had been wondering for a long time when I'd find an album that would make me feel so hopeful and happy and the robots did it perfectly.

Before hand, when I listened to Homework for the first time I decided to stick to just listening to that part of their discography - at the time, I was much younger and due to hearing One More Time and Get Lucky on the radio very often, I shrugged the rest of their catalogue off to listen to at a later date. After hearing Discovery, I had to see what I'd been missing out on all of these years.

I ended up listening to Alive 1997 next - a 45 minute excerpt of a concert they played in Birmingham on their first tour in support of Homework. As I expected, it was filled with all of the smooth, awesome and sometimes jittery grooves that had featured in Homework, and to this day I still listen to the set frequently due to how fun and awesome it is.

My journey led me next to Human After All - released in 2005, this album was a stylistic departure from Discovery and replaced the upbeat, sample filled nature of their last album with a cold, dystopian-like take on robotically idiosyncratic electronic music.

Although it polarized fans and critics at the time - Human After All has since found a well deserved amount of high praise within Daft Punk's large fan base and it is highly understandable why. Most of the tracks on the album feature defining sounds of their music - the iconic vocoders, house like beats and repetitive nature give off a similar feel to Homework - only if it was a little more serious. My favourite tracks are Human After All, Robot Rock, Make Love and The Prime Time of Your Life

Next up comes their second and final live album - Alive 2007.

This was other amazing listening experience and for me it feels like the culmination of ten years of incredible music. Alive 2007 is known for its incredible replay ability and most importantly the amazing mashups which blend their most well known work.

A favourite among fans of the duo, this live album is able to combine the best of all of their work so far - from their first single released in the early 90s all the way to the tracks on Human After All, the duo turn several years of great work into a neat little performance which sums up the duo in the best way possible. My personal favourite mashups from the album include Harder Better Faster Stronger / Around The World, Human After All / Superheroes / Rock n' Roll and finally Burnin' / Too Long.

After several years, Daft Punk released one last album - the critically acclaimed Random Access Memories. Unlike the rest of their fantastic bodies of work, this was a huge stylistic departure from everything they had done over the last twenty years, replacing house beats, sampled grooves and robotic like, repetitive beats entirely for lush instrumentation, fantastic pop grooves and appearances from major pop stars and fabled musicians.

Recorded over five years, RAM was a musical gift which keeps on giving, even eleven years after release. All of the tracks ooze magnificent quality and superb production and just like Discovery, this album was fun, nostalgic in a brilliant way and it blew me away, shattering my expectations completely for an album from producers that initially established themselves at the forefront of the dance music scene.

Along with the incredible instrumentation, production and sonic quality, RAM features appearances from some of the music industry's finest - pop producer and vocalist Pharrell Williams of the Neptunes appears on two amazing tracks which are reminiscent of the 70s disco scene - Giorgio Moroder appears on Giorgio by Moroder, renowned bassist Nile Rodgers appears on Get Lucky, house music superstar and legend Todd Edwards is featured on Fragments of Time and there are also heavily important contributions from Julian Casablancas, Paul Williams and Panda Bear.

To put it simply - as a final gift, Random Access Memories is an incredible piece of work which deserves all of the praise it gets. It rounds off Daft Punk's career wonderfully, ending their discography in the best way possible.

Besides all of their albums, I also got into some of the more underground stuff that they put out over the years - for example, back in 2003 they put out an anime film that acted as a giant music video for their second album Discovery called Interstella 5555 - this film was about an alien bandthat were kidnapped to perform on Earth, and with the help of their fans on Earth they manage to return home.

The film was created with legendary Japanese manga artist Leiji Matsumoto - giving the film a distinctively brilliant art style, all set to an incredible electronic music album. You can find the whole thing on YouTube.

In conclusion, these are a few of the many reasons as to why I adore Daft Punk - and if you are reading this now and are in need of new things to listen to - give them a spin! The journey that awaits you is incredible.