The best of Daft Punk: 10 career highlights of French dance duo, from One More Time to the Weeknd and Get Lucky
- Exploding robots announced the end of Daft Punk after 28 years of electronic music dance anthems and performances
- Here are 10 of the best moments, from One More Time to Get Lucky from their Grammy winning album Random Access Memories
The French duo of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, known worldwide as Daft Punk, were already beloved before they took the stage at the Coachella music festival in 2006. They had three acclaimed studio albums, a decade of semi-regular touring and the esteem of dance music and pop sophisticates alike.
Starting in the 1990s, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo hid their faces under gold and silver robot masks, rarely breaking character, but became recognisable pop stars in their own right.
When the lights went on over their gigantic pyramid at Coachella in the California desert, though, and a tent full of neophyte young ravers felt the disco thrash of Robot Rock, a whole electronic dance music (EDM) industry was shot into the stratosphere, remaking festival culture in the United States for a generation.
“No one had seen anything like that,” dance music historian Michaelangelo Matos said in the 2015 documentary Daft Punk Unchained. “No one had seen that level of production. Everybody who was in the tent was texting everybody else: ‘You are missing this! This is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen! You’re missing the greatest performance of all time’.”
With the release of a video exploding their robot bodies forever, the French duo announced on Monday that they would retire, 28 years after forming and seven years after their smash Get Lucky propelled an album of the year win at the Grammys for “Random Access Memories”.
