For Fans of Daft Punk

Before 'Discovery,' electronic music and mainstream pop existed in polite distance from each other. The 2001 album collapsed that distance in 75 minutes, sampling 70s funk and turning it into something that felt entirely new, entirely the robots' own. Every track was designed to score an anime episode, which is exactly what happened with Interstella 5555. It is the rare record that functions equally as background, as headphone revelation, and as cinema soundtrack. No album since has pulled off the same trick at the same scale.

Most artists craft a persona to seem more interesting. Daft Punk did the opposite: they hid behind helmets so the music could be more interesting. By removing their faces, they removed celebrity from the equation. You could not fixate on them. You had to listen. In an era obsessed with the cult of personality, it was a quietly radical act, and it worked: fans felt they owned the music in a way that parasocial pop stars never allow.

The robots who hated humanity made their final album as a hymn to it. Recorded almost entirely with live musicians, with Giorgio Moroder narrating his own life over synthesizers, with Nile Rodgers and Paul Williams and Julian Casablancas each bringing their specific human irreplaceability, 'Random Access Memories' was a farewell disguised as a celebration. Heard now, after the 2021 split, it sounds like a goodbye written years before the goodbye was announced.

Tetsuya Mizuguchi built Rez on the idea that sight and sound and touch should collapse into a single sensation, which is exactly what Daft Punk spent their career attempting in music. Firing at enemies that explode in rhythmic bursts while a techno score builds around your actions is the closest interactive media has come to the feeling of being inside 'Harder Better Faster Stronger.' The Infinite remaster adds a floating, all-encompassing VR mode that seals the comparison entirely.