Every Daft Punk Album Ranked

Electro-enfants terribles Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo announced the conclusion of their 28-year musical partnership in true Daft Punk fashion, with an eight-minute video titled “Epilogue,” which depicts the French duo—dressed in their iconic racing suits and robot helmets—parting ways with explosive finality. Daft Punk carved out a unique space for themselves in the electronic music world in the late 1990s with hits like “Da Funk” and “Around the World.” The group’s 2001 album, Discovery, and its accompanying nü-disco hit “One More Time” proved they were more than a French techno curio, while 2013’s Grammy-winning Random Access Memories cemented Bangalter and de Homem-Christo’s status as EDM legends. In honor of Daft Punk’s nearly three-decade run, we’ve ranked all five of their albums. Sal Cinquemani

5. TRON: Legacy Original Soundtrack (2010)

Instead of the menacing, body-ravaging textures Thomas Bangalter gave the soundtrack to Gaspar Noe’s predatory Irréversible, and instead of the even more brain-meltingly monolithic assault beats Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo perpetrated on his side-project Crydamoure label, Daft Punk’s cues for TRON: Legacy are safe, tamed, and domesticated. Instead of their previously faultless ear for yesterday’s synthetic textures that should’ve plucked the baton right from Carlos’s neo-prog fingertips, we get the same old half-Wagnerian, half-Carmina Buranic pulsations, with heavy, plodding orchestrations, chugging string section riffs, and Hans Zimmeresque tribal drums sweetened only occasionally and very stingily with the cheapjack distortions and squelches you know and love (most notably in “Derezzed” and the end titles). It’s all too clear Disney wanted the cachet, not the daft nor the punk. Eric Henderson

4. Human After All (2005)

With Human After All, Daft Punk demonstrated that they were willing to defend their status as practically the only French pop-house act—no, make that the only pop-house act anywhere—capable of shaping solid, unified dance music albums. And, in some inscrutable act of mercy killing, they were willing to defend it to the point of disregarding every aspect of the process that isn’t album-oriented. Human After All is a capital-A Album that somehow fails to be just about anything else: a) a collection of danceable jams, b) an act of pop artifice that, like 2001’s Discovery, also manages to work spectacularly as pop sincerity, or c) music. But, by God, there’s an LP ethos here, albeit one that seems to depend on having tapped into Discovery, the cheez-whiz blend of early-’80s trash-rock, MOR nattering, and streamlined post-disco funk of which still proved visionary enough that its own creators apparently deigned to reimagine the brew in a masturbatory act of satire. Henderson

3. Random Access Memories (2013)

Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, simultaneously the most narcissistic and selfless gesture of their careers, is a painstaking mission statement. With shades of soul brothers in bemused detachment Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, the album hops between genres in a way that threatens to satisfy fans of none of them, dissecting the elements of each and filling the room with the sour odor of formaldehyde. Their music here is as unnervingly stiff and rewardingly labored as Steely Dan’s later albums, and also as rewardingly fussy. No one would dare dispute their bona fides, but their genius seems directed at too-cool-for-school deconstruction, musicianship sublimated to presumptuous but mesmerizing instructiveness. Fagen and Becker were dedicated mixologists obsessing over the flavor profiles of their homemade bitters, but refusing to let the base spirit of any cocktail assert its own innate character. De Homem-Christo and Bangalter are cake bosses sculpting layers of neon fondant into stiff peaks simulating meringue, selectively editing out the cake itself. Henderson

2. Homework (1997)

Daft Punk threw their collective dick down on the dance floor with the thick house jam “Musique,” which basically repeated the same word and filtered sample ad nauseam, almost daring you to counter that it wasn’t what its title claimed it to be. Their first LP, Homework, proved that endurance wasn’t going to be an issue. Their indescribably funky blend of fat house beats, squelching synthetic compression tricks, on-the-cheap veracity, and borrowed Studio-54 sheen would wear you out long before Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo were ready to finish roll-calling their teachers. From the loopy disco of “Around the World” and the deep, syncopated rhythms of “Revolution 909” to the roaring momentum of “Rollin’ & Scratchin’,” Homework is pure, distilled club essence. Henderson

1. Discovery (2001)

Disco never really died, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t need to be resurrected. And while it certainly didn’t lack for prominent advocates during the ’90s and ‘00s, perhaps the earliest and most important champions of disco’s rebirth were the rascally robots in Daft Punk. Discovery was a surprise not just because Daft Punk was using their post-Homework cred to resuscitate a much-reviled genre, but because they also chose to embrace its cheesier sounds: the gossamer harp on “Voyager,” the strings on “One More Time.” “Yes, we love disco,” they said. “We love it big and gaudy, covered in melting makeup and glitter, ecstatic and wistful and magical. So should you.” Dave Hughes