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11:46 · 1,610 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- The name came from an insult. Their failed punk band was dismissed by a critic as daft punky thrash, and they took the phrase as a brief and set out to prove the reviewer wrong.
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- Homework was assembled in about five months and made them the best-selling French act in the world, helped into the UK top ten by a huge European club scene and major label support.
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- The method changed between records. Homework ran a single sample or synth line over a house pattern, while Discovery layered many samples and pulled from seventies and eighties disco and funk.
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- One More Time was the first track finished and the closer was the second, which set the album's bookends before anything between them existed.
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- With those two in place they decided it would not be 14 house tracks like the debut, and turned toward a polished synth pop that surprised early fans.
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- The organising idea was childhood innocence, projecting fun and resisting the urge to over-analyse their own arrangements.
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- Aerodynamic moves from tolling church bells into a digital cathedral and then into a string-tapping hard rock riff, which is the clearest case of their genre collisions.
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- The robotic feel is a production trick, not an effect on the voice alone. Harder Better Faster Stronger uses a noise gate on the drums so they cut off early, suggesting a drummer who is not quite human.
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- The second half turns down-tempo into seventies-style balladry, territory entirely new for them, and that material previews the two albums that followed.
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- Every copy of the record included membership to Daft Club, an online forum with exclusive content, which built a direct artist-to-fan channel years before SoundCloud or Patreon.
▶ 00:07:51