Featured

Playlists, albums, articles & videos from our Rhapsody music experts.

Artist Spotlight: Daft Punk

by Napster

Daft Punk got their start, in 1994, as a couple of house DJs who just wanted to bring disco back to the dancefloor. Since then, they've gone on to get pop fans hooked on vocoders with Discovery; introduce rock music to the dance kids with 2005's Human After All; and (sorry, James Murphy) introduce dance to the rock kids via their era-defining Coachella 2006 appearance perched inside a gigantic, glowing pyramid.

Then, 19 years later, they returned with the most grandiose and confounding album of their entire career: Random Access Memories, a big-budget re-creation of silky disco, R&B and West Coast AOR. The album is aided and abetted by an impressively motley crew that includes Giorgio Moroder, Chic's Nile Rodgers, Animal Collective's Panda Bear, The Strokes' Julian Casablancas, Pharrell Williams and even Paul Williams, the veteran songwriter responsible for hits for Three Dog Night and The Carpenters, as well as _The Muppet Movie's "Rainbow Connection."

Explore the French duo's discography, and robot rock your way to the end of their rainbow with our playlist of Daft Punk's highlights.

Homework

Daft Punk

With the hit single "Around The World," that's indeed where Daft Punk took this 1997 release. Featuring repetitive vocoder-led vocals, rock-based riffs, and heavy filtering, Daft Punk presented new concepts in House. This simplified sound differentiated them from many overproduced mainstream dance albums and has since influenced many.

Discovery

Daft Punk

Paris' coolest pair of cybernetics perfects its robot rock on Discovery, morphing Homework's buzzy filter disco into an even suppler strain of electro-funk. Never shy of lite-FM cliches, they turn guilty pleasures into unabashed house anthems with "One More Time" and "Digital Love," and give the vocoder a passionate workout on the infectious "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger." Throughout, the synths go to 11 and the vocals beam down from cloud nine. Establishing one of the decade's most durable sounds, Discovery paved the way for everyone from Justice to Kanye.

Daft Club

Daft Punk

Auto-tuned vocoder singing never sounded so seductive. The howl of a connecting modem opens this remix LP of 2001's Discovery, as distorted electric piano notes intertwine with ascending synthesizers. Includes a Neptunes mix (but of course), and reminds us that the most soulful electronic music is usually Parisian.

Human After All

Daft Punk

Four years on from Discovery, the French duo releases its third album sounding darker and grittier than before, as if AC/DC and Black Sabbath have been let loose on a bank of sequencers. Still fabulously danceable, the music is less pop and more vital -- the beats attack harder this time. Distinctly more punk than daft, they look like robots, but rock like humans.

Musique, Vol. 1

Daft Punk

Released on the heels of Human After All, Musique Vol. 1 collects the essential dance-floor hits from Daft Punk's first three albums and pads them out with key B-sides like "Musique," off their debut single. While most fans would probably prefer just to listen to the albums, the collection makes for a solid introduction to the duo at their danciest, while Daft Punk's remixes for Ian Pooley and Scott Grooves (featuring P-Funk!) are welcome discoveries.

Alive 2007

Daft Punk

Can a live album ever get across the staggering brilliance of an utterly mind-blowing spectacle? Daft Punk's Pyramid tour, certainly the finest electronic/dance show of all time, is arguably one of the best live performances in any genre by any group -- and if you think otherwise, you weren't there. This recording of a Paris show certainly captures the massive energy generated by blending and tweaking their catalog into submission, but sound was only part of the experience. As such, this is an excellent souvenir, but what's really needed is a DVD or a time machine to see it all again.

TRON: Legacy

Daft Punk

Listeners expecting one more "One More Time" or "Robot Rock" may be surprised by Daft Punk's soundtrack to the 2010 sequel to Tron. Their score to the cyber-thriller doesn't forgo the synthesizers entirely, but they're folded into conventional orchestral beds, heavy on swelling strings and obvious drama. Occasionally, an electronic passage will recall Tangerine Dream's arpeggiated fantasias, but for the most part they follow the lead of Wendy Carlos' similarly hybrid score for the original Tron, locking electronic experimentation within a familiar Hollywood frame.

Random Access Memories

Daft Punk

The robots get a serious reboot on their fourth studio album, their first proper LP in eight years. Time-traveling to an era when pyramids were found on Asia's album covers rather than festival stages, they evoke prog excess on the grandest of scales, far more AOR than EDM. Giorgio Moroder, Nile Rodgers, Julian Casablancas and Panda Bear help round out their fusion-disco epics, but it's Muppets songwriter Paul Williams and his "Touch" that really bring this Pinocchio story to life. Generous to a fault, it's a glorious refutation that they don't make 'em like they used to.