Columbia/daft life

Daft Punk have discarded the now common formula of repetitive house beats and digital noises in favor of real-life musicians and analog synths. In doing so, they have crafted an album that makes the old seem new again. No song exemplifies this confluence of past, present and future better than “Giorgio By Moroder,” which transitions between trance, jazz, classical, hip-hop and trance again before exploding in a guitar-laden finale. Then, there’s “Doin’ It Right,” an electro-pop collaboration with Animal Collective’s Panda Bear that follows “Fragments Of Time,” a song that sounds like something from the disco record that Steely Dan never made. The album begins and ends with two bombastic tracks, “Give Life Back to Music” and “Contact,” that seem as if they were made for the stadiums that the duo will inevitably fill. When Daft Punk announced that they would be releasing Random Access Memories, their first proper album in eight years, plenty of folks hoped that the record would make a statement to the younger generation of producers – something along the lines of “this is how it’s done.” Instead, the influential French electronic duo have a slightly different statement to make: “This is how it should be done.”