Discovery

Both of Daft Punk's first two albums were recorded in a bedroom in Thomas Bangalter's Paris apartment. Not a studio. Not a professional facility. A bedroom with a small JVC boombox that Bangalter had kept since his parents gave it to him for his eleventh birthday. They mixed both Homework and Discovery through that boombox, running keyboards and samplers through it because, as Bangalter later explained, it had a specific compression character that they could not replicate anywhere else. An album that sold millions of copies and influenced an entire generation of producers was mixed through a birthday present.

Discovery took two years to make, from 1998 to 2000, and represented a fundamental shift in what Daft Punk were doing. Their debut had been built on sampled funk and soul records. For Discovery, roughly half the album started as live instruments that Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo played themselves, then sampled, resampled, and ran through layers of effects until the original source was transformed beyond recognition. Giorgio Moroder visited the studio at one point and watched them spend a full week dialing in a single vocoder sound. De Homem-Christo described the production as jewelry work: precise, intricate, each detail tended to until it was exactly right. On "Digital Love," they wanted a Supertramp keyboard sound on the bridge, so rather than sample Supertramp, they tracked down the original Wurlitzer piano the band had used and recorded it themselves.

The album runs as a continuous experience of euphoria and nostalgia simultaneously, built from childhood memories of seventies and eighties pop filtered through a French electronic sensibility. "One More Time," "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger," "Digital Love," and "Aerodynamic" are four of the most purely pleasurable songs in electronic music. Put it on and give yourself over to it entirely. That is the only correct way to listen.