Earlier today, Daft Punk announced their breakup with a video of an exploding robot, taken from their 2006 film Electroma. It’s a fitting epilogue for a duo that harnessed the power of sound and vision more than almost any other musical act across the last three decades. In addition to their string of iconic dance hits, much of their legacy as pop innovators can be seen through their weird and wonderful music videos. From the sad man-dog saga of “Da Funk” to the anime fantasia of Discovery’s companion film Interstella 5555 to the disco oasis of “Get Lucky,” Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo presented cinematic worlds that were giddy, moody, bizarre—that few others could ever hope to dream up, let alone execute with such imaginative panache. Here are some of our favorites.
“Da Funk” (1996)
Not so much a music video as a short film featuring a guy in a somewhat microwaved dog costume wandering through New York City with a boombox, “Da Funk” was the world’s first introduction to the clipped French house sound of Daft Punk. It’s not one of director Spike Jonze’s most recognizable videos, but the music—which Bangalter insisted at the time was influenced by listening to Warren G’s “Regulate”—and the visuals planted the seed that would make them synonymous with the limitless feeling of a neon-lit, after-hours metropolis. The misadventures of our hapless, be-crutched dog is all soundtracked by “Da Funk,” a song that hits hard but has just a touch of melancholy inside of it. The video established the chemistry that would carry the duo through their entire career. –Jeremy D. Larson
“Around the World” (1997)
By 1997, the American music industry had decided that something called “electronica” was going to be the future, and MTV viewers were presented with a dizzying array of options for how that future might look. The Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers struck first in 1996 with their videos for “Firestarter” and “Setting Sun,” suggesting that the future might be a bit like ’70s punk or ’60s psychedelia. Daft Punk’s “Around the World,” directed by Michel Gondry as he was coming into the peak of his powers, looked and sounded like something else altogether. With its five groups of costumed dancers—including skeletons, mummies, and in a sign of tricks to come, robots—in front of bright lights, each moving in tandem with an element of the music, the video showed that the future could be cute, funny, and campy all at once. It was fruitful in other ways, too, precipitating another collaboration between Gondry and Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter in their unforgettable video for side project Stardust’s “Music Sounds Better With You,” as well as influencing LCD Soundsystem’s “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House” video eight years later. –Marc Hogan
“Revolution 909” (1998)
Even at the beginning of their career, Daft Punk found new ways to pair music with images—and in the process, pushed forward the visual languages of not just dance music but pop, full stop. For the 1998 single “Revolution 909,” a hypnotic standout from their debut album, Homework, they could have opted for a video treatment that mirrored the track’s loop-heavy repetitions. Instead, working with director Roman Coppola, they embarked upon a narrative video with absurdist overtones.
Like how a telephone ringing in the next room might influence the direction of a dream, the video takes essential cues from the song’s curious mise-en-scène. On record, it begins with the muted sounds of a crowded party, heard as if from outside the venue, followed by police sirens, a stern warning to disperse, and screams; as the rave collapses into a raid, a well-timed filter sweep plunges us directly into the midst of a throbbing dancefloor, and the music begins in earnest. The video initially seems intent to simply reconstruct that same scene—but then a blood-red stain on a policeman’s shirt collar opens the trap door to an unexpected narrative digression of Charlie Kaufman-like proportions, taking us from the first green shoots of a sprouting tomato plant through B-roll of picking, sorting, shipping, and shopping. Cooking-show subtitles accompany the motions of a white-haired woman making pasta sauce in her kitchen; her Tupperware of spaghetti ends up in the hands of a cop eating in his car. Finally, a hasty slurp stains his shirt. Cue the déjà vu-like coda of cops busting ravers—except this time, the policeman notices the red splotch on his shirt, giving the young woman the chance to beat a hasty retreat. A tongue-in-cheek tale of farm-to-table to rave, it’s a precursor of all the ways Daft Punk would find to play with loops over the next couple of decades. –Philip Sherburne
“Something About Us” (2003)
Interstella 5555 is essential viewing for any Daft Punk fan: A full anime film soundtracked by the entirety of their second album, Discovery, created in collaboration with the robots’ childhood hero, manga artist Leiji Matsumoto, and director Kazuhisa Takenouchi. Each music video from Discovery is clipped from this movie, and “Something About Us” highlights one of its most affecting scenes. In it, a blue-skinned alien pilot named Shep is mortally wounded while on a mission to save a music group called the Crescendolls, who have been brought to Earth and brainwashed to perform for its human masses. Stella, the band’s leader, is still constrained by psychic blinders, unable to remember who she is until she takes Shep’s hand in his final moments, triggering a dream sequence of flying dandelions and blooming technicolor.
Daft Punk’s artistic ethos has always been about breathing new life into the past, and this applies across Interstella 5555. The animation style was considered old-fashioned upon its release, even by early-2000s standards—but the robots wanted to evoke the feelings of the cartoons they grew up watching, like Matsumoto’s own Captain Harlock. They recognized that anime and dance music were perfect for each other, that both mediums encouraged imaginative wonder, and that this freedom might let them evoke emotions previously unexplored. –Noah Yoo
“Robot Rock” (2005)
Look, “Robot Rock” isn’t the greatest Daft Punk song (too repetitive, not squirmy or joyful enough), and its video can’t top most of the classics found on this list. But in the chronology of Daft Punk, experienced in real time, the lead Human After All single served its purpose. The “Robot Rock” video marked the first time viewers got to see the robots on the move and in the flesh, playing their instruments no less. Self-directed and styled like a grainy VHS tape, the clip was something of a DIY precursor to the straightforward and aesthetically immersive performance videos that Daft Punk made for Random Access Memories. What to expect: tight leather, crotch shots, a double-neck guitar, a disco ball, and more lens flare than an amateur nature photographer’s Instagram. Ever the tricksters, Daft Punk were playing with classic signifiers of rock and disco in a way that made them seem larger than life, even when confronted with the fact that they’re just two dudes in robot suits. It’s the kind of clip that, combined with their live albums, made me long to see them perform one day. –Jillian Mapes
“The Prime Time of Your Life” (2006)
Discovery introduced Daft Punk’s sleek cyborg guise, but on Human After All they went full robot, trading romantic futurism for a machine-ruled dystopia. It made sense, then, that their visual language would take an ominous turn, too; for the “The Prime Time of Your Life” video, the duo enlisted Tony Gardner—a makeup artist and special effects veteran whose horror bona fides includes Army of Darkness, Seed of Chucky, and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”—to direct.
The clip centers on a young girl haunted by her looming fate: In this world, all adults are mobile skeletons (perhaps a nod to John Carpenter’s Orwellian They Live). She watches fleshless weathermen give the forecast and recalls trips to the beach with her skeleton family. Rather than wait to decay, she decides to flay herself in the bathroom, revealing her underlying pink muscles. It is a dark twist on the song’s cry for urgency—a theme that is already subverted by Daft Punk’s croaking blasts and punishing drum outro. That the pair followed their blissful Discovery with an album of brutal bangers and disturbing visuals only affirms their resistance to obey expectation. –Madison Bloom
Alive Tour Fan Videos (2006-2007)
Daft Punk’s most spectacular visual gambit took the form of a giant pyramid with enough voltage running through it to power their native City of Lights. They premiered their monolithic live setup at Coachella in 2006 before lugging it around the world for the next year and a half, spreading ecstasy along the way. I was there at the Brooklyn show, and it still stands as one of the most hands-in-the-air joyous concert experiences of my life—an immense party conducted by a couple of robots from the future who were channeling ancient Egypt as they dialed into the euphoria of collective communion.
At this point, the tour is best remembered via thousands of shaky fan-made YouTube videos. The quality of most of these clips is, by today’s crisp 4K standards, incredibly bad—the digital cameras and flip phones of the era were no match for the show’s bombarding strobes and bass. But the relative lo-fi-ness also makes the videos feel that much more immediate, as if spectators were losing their minds to the sight of a grainy alien landing in real time. –Ryan Dombal
“Get Lucky” (2013)
The colossal hold that Daft Punk seized over pop culture in 2013 with “Get Lucky” is hard to overstate. The duo’s elegant disco comeback, first teased through ads on SNL and at Coachella, hurled them back into the zeitgeist with mildly surreal visuals of the robots sporting slick, sequined suits. As the first single from Random Access Memories, “Get Lucky” peaked at No. 2, and by the end of the year, Nile Rodgers’ guitar licks and Pharrell’s hook were playing out of cars, in supermarkets, and at every wedding reception across the globe.
The sleek video for “Get Lucky” is unforgettable in its own right, with Rodgers and Pharrell matching the disco decadence of Daft Punk’s shimmering suits, as all four perform on a platform floating in space. There are also shots of twirling disco balls, swaying palm trees, and Daft Punk in a space station with leather interiors. The most lasting image, though, captures the artists silhouetted against a blazing sunset, like a heat mirage that could vanish at any moment. –Eric Torres
