Daft Punk’s ‘Random Access Memories’: A tenth anniversary retrospective

Kira Atanasiu

This spring marks the tenth anniversary of French duo Daft Punk’s fourth and last album, Random Access Memories. There’s a chance the name doesn’t sound familiar to you now, but this album was big at the time—lead single ‘Get Lucky’ was the group’s frst and only UK #1, and Daft Punk were essentially the protagonists of the 2014 Grammy Awards, two white-clad robot-heads collecting win after win after win, topping it off with the ffth and most important ‘Album of the Year’. This still does not explain why we should be looking back at this album ten years on. Albums happen, they get big, even huge, but very few remain in the public consciousness after the last of their singles fzzles out of the Top 100. That said—when it comes to Daft Punk, it’s a bit of a different story. Daft Punk have been around since 1997, which means we’ve had enough time to see whether their sound has had any effect on the landscape of music as a whole. And, decidedly, it has. Not only have countless artists from Avicii and Skrillex to Jay-Z heralded the duo’s early releases as life-changing, but their second album Discovery has often been credited as a pivotal predecessor to the EDM genre. So, the obvious question follows: if Daft Punk’s early 2000s music bled over into the pop and dance music of the 2010s, could we now be seeing the echoes of their 2013 project in today’s pop trends?

I’m arguing that we absolutely are. Daft Punk’s fourth and fnal album was a real change in direction for their sound. If the duo’s previous projects are remarkable in their lack of real instrumentation, their songs formed from an intricate mesh of samples chaotically worked into dance music, Random Access Memories is obstinately analogue. With session musicians that had previously worked on Thriller, collaborations such as Bugsy Malone songwriter Paul Williams, and purposefully vintage recording equipment, the album carries a palpably retro groove. Iconic disco guitarist and producer Nile Rodgers, whose instantly recognisable brighttimbred guitar appears on multiple Random Access Memories tracks, says of the project that “it’s like they went back to go forward”. If the early 2010s, when the album was being composed, are full to the brim with electronic and digitalage-sounding music—from the 2009 robopop of ‘Boom Boom Pow’ to the 2012 meme-fuelled EDM trap of ‘Harlem Shake’—then returning to vintage synthesisers and acoustic instruments is downright counterculture for a dance music group. As ‘Fragments of Time’ feature Todd Edwards says, “You’re listening to [the tracks] and they’re future classics. [Daft Punk] brought the sound of something that’s been lost for a long time.”

So, the question remains. What is there in our current pop landscape that could possibly have its roots in Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories?

Well, of course, frst of all we have the monogenre. This album brings together disco, funk, pop, and electronic infuences in an early example of the genre that pop music has been tending towards since the mid2010s: that is, no genre. While the monogenre was frst being conceptualised around the time Random Access Memories was released, nowadays it’s a given in the current music industry. Neither newcomers, such as Lil Nas X with his record-breaking country-fusion ‘Old Town Road’, nor established voices, like Ariana Grande with her trap-infused Positions album, shy away from blending genres. As overlap grows between the indie, pop, rap, and rock charts, Thomas Bangalter’s quote—”we really liked the idea of breaking all the barriers between these musical genres”— starts sounding less and less about their album exclusively and more and more about the duo’s plans for music as a whole. But what genres do remain also seem to follow a markedly Daft-Punk-esque trajectory. The Grammy Awards’ website declares jubilantly at the end of last year that “pop has seen a disco