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Daft Punk's ‘Homework’ and ‘Discovery’ were recorded in Thomas Bangalter's bedroom

Both albums were mixed and recorded using a JVC boombox that Bangalter had been given for his 11th birthday

• Becky Buckle
• 11 August 2023

Thomas Bangalter has revealed that pivotal Daft Punk records ‘Homework’ and ‘Discovery were recorded in his bedroom.

Theories have circulated for many years over whether the pair's debut, and second album respectively, had been recorded in one of their bedrooms — a theory that has been been confirmed as true by Bangalter.

In an interview with Matt Everitt, on his podcast, The First Time… Bangalter was questioned: “The myth is that ‘Homework’ was all in your bedroom, is that true?”

Read this next: Thomas Bangalter explains the real reason for Daft Punk's split

In which he replied: “It’s true, ‘Homework’ and ‘Discovery’ were done in the bedroom, in the same flat as I was watching Modern Times and we had [Stevie Wonder album] ‘Songs in the Key of Life’ constantly on the turntables.

"In this small bedroom, my parents had given me this small boombox for my 11th birthday, a JVC boombox with a little graphic equaliser, and I kept this thing.”

He adds: “One day when we plugged in a few keyboards and samplers, I found that boombox and I put it on the stack of machines. And that little boombox is what we mixed and recorded both ‘Homework’ and ‘Discovery’ on. That was the magic one.”

‘Homework’ was released in 1997 whilst ‘Discovery’ came years later in 2001 with Mixmag describing it at the time as "the perfect non-pop pop album" and claiming the duo had "altered the course of dance music for the second time" within the April 2001 issue.

Read this next: An interview with Daniel Vangarde, dad of Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter

This new interview with Bangalter also covers topics such as the origins of the electronic duo as well as what the future holds for him.

Also discussing music, Bangalter plays tracks from the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Paul Williams, Stevie Wonder and more.

Listen to the full podcast episode here .

Becky Buckle is Mixmag's Multimedia Editor, follow her on Twitter

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THE STORIES BEHIND THE MUSIC

Daft Punk’s ‘Homework’ – the story behind the album’s iconic cover

On 20 January 1997, French duo Daft Punk released Homework , their devastating, disco-funk infused debut, which would go on to be one of the most influential albums in electronic music history.

The recording of Homework was a straightforward process, as the group’s Thomas Bangalter told CMJ New Music Monthly in 1997 – “we made the record at home, very cheaply, very quickly, and spontaneously, trying to do cool stuff” .

But when it came time to package the collection of tracks into an album, the group were a bit more methodical, as Nicolas Hidiroglou , who photographed both the album’s sleek black cover and inner sleeve, tells 909originals.

Over to you, Nicolas.

“ I had been working with a number of artists, and I was working with The Face and other magazines at the time,” he explains. “ A friend said to me there’s a new band called Daft Punk that is putting together an album, you should check them out.

“I had already done some work with Virgin Records, and Daft Punk had already done a few things with Virgin; compilations with other, more established artists. The public didn’t know them at this stage, but there was a buzz about them. They were just teenagers at the time.”

Hidiroglou was thus invited to meet the duo in and listen to the demo Homework for the first time.

“It sounded so different, and completely new,” he says. “I had never heard anything like it – that mix of disco and funk. They played the vinyl for me in this little room; I had no idea I was listening to history.

“ I remember Thomas was very sure about what was going to happen – Daft Punk were going to tour in the UK, and tour America. They were very sure of themselves, and how everything was going to work out.”

Both Bangalter and compatriot Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo (who had previously designed the now-famous Daft Punk logo) had an idea of what they wanted for the album’s cover and inner sleeve.

“We spent about a week putting it together,” Hidiroglou recalls. “They wanted to try out a number of different fabrics before they found exactly what they wanted – the black satin. We spent a lot of time making everything perfect.

“With the inside cover, that had been all arranged by Thomas at his home. I went to his house and met his father – who had been a big producer in the past – and we went up to Thomas’ room. He had prepared everything on the desk just as it appears on the album.

“It was the first time for me to meet an artist who had so much visibility of what they wanted and where they wanted to be. They knew they would be big, but perhaps not as quickly as it worked out. It took just a few months.”

Following on from the release of Homework (as well as some side work for Bangalter’s side labels Roulé and Scratché), Hidiroglou was again called upon to take some promotional shots of the group.

“I had a little shop close to the Sacré-Cœur , and we shot lots of press pictures in the basement. Thomas did some ‘Daft Punk’ graffiti tags on the wall, so I shot that, and I also took some photos of the two of them.

“Back then, they already had the idea of covering their faces – this was a few years before the ‘robots’ – as they didn’t want to be well-known like other artists. We tried different solutions, putting things on their faces, wearing masks, things like that.

“For me, this was not a big thing – I had worked with lots of famous people, and was used to requests like this. But I remember when Daft Punk became famous, people spoke badly about it – people thought they were ‘too proud’ to show their faces. But really, it was them trying something new.”

While fame came quickly for Daft Punk outside of France, in their home country the duo remained “pretty underground for the first year”, Hidiroglou explains. “People didn’t really see the significance of what they were doing, even music people.

“I didn’t think the cover of Homework was a big project for me at the time, but now, it has appeared in a lot of books and magazines. Today it’s seen as a ‘reference point’, but when I did it, I did’t see the significance of it.

“I still meet Thomas sometimes, he lives close to my house. I saw Guy-Man a month ago. It’s more a friendly relationship now, as opposed to a business relationship.”

[Thanks to Nicolas for the interview. You can view his portfolio of work, which includes photography for a series of international artists, actors and musicians, at hidiro.com ]

Read more : From disco to D.I.S.C.O. – how Thomas Bangalter’s dad helped set the Daft Punk template

For all the latest news on techno, house, and rave culture, features on the hottest nightclubs and interviews with the world’s best DJs, make sure 909originals is your go-to source.  www.909originals.com

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Daft Punk’s Homework Synth Sounds

On January 20th, 1997 – 25 years ago today – Daft Punk released their debut album, Homework . They hadn’t planned to release an album, but they’d spent five months recording tracks and decided they had enough material for an album. In a 1997 interview , Thomas Bangalter stated that “The Homework title relates to the fact that we made the record at home, very cheaply, and very quickly and spontaneously, trying to do cool stuff.” Many of the songs on Homework had been made to play live in clubs, so the album has a raw, live feel to it.

In a 1999 interview with a Japanese magazine , Daft Punk listed all the gear used on Homework and even outlined their typical recording process. The gear listed is mostly vintage Roland, including a Juno-106, MC-202, MKS-80 and a TB-303 alongside a digital Sequential Prophet-VS. 

For drum machines, they listed the LinnDrum and Roland TR-707, TR-808 and TR-909 as the drum machines used on the Homework . They used E-mu SP1200, Ensoniq ASR-10 and Roland S-760 samplers alongside a host of effects, sequencers, and mixers.

This article focuses on the synth sounds of Homework and how to recreate them using modern softsynths. I’ve recreated Da Funk and Around the World  and the presets that I created for the remakes are available for free download at the end of the article. This is a follow-up to last year’s Daft Punk’s Discovery Synth Sounds article, which I recommend checking out after this one!

Da Funk was the first single to be released from Homework and was played live from as early as 1995. It features a distorted guitar-like melody playing over a relentless 4-to-the-floor beat before a famous acid-bass synth line ends the song. Before I start talking about where the sounds came from, here’s my remake, created from scratch with no samples from the original song:

The distorted synth line has a characteristic band-passed sound run through distortion, which creates a sound similar to an overdriven electric guitar. The melody is played in perfect fourths throughout, so the original patch likely had an oscillator tuned to a fourth.

The common belief is that the Da Funk lead synth sound is a Korg MS-20, but the MS-20 wasn’t listed by Daft Punk on their Homework or  Discovery gear lists. There are no photos of them using a Korg MS-20 and they’ve never mentioned the MS-20 in their interviews.  Although the MS-20 is a strong contender for the Da Funk sound because of its high-pass filter and the ability to patch in distortion. I think it’s more likely that they used their Roland Juno-106 or MKS-80, both of which have high-pass filters, run through a distortion pedal such as the Ibanez Fat Cat Distortion seen in the below live pictures:

The Da Funk lead synth also sounds like it’s been sampled and played back from a sampler. The beginning note of each phrase has a slightly different envelope time – the higher note’s envelopes playback faster than the lower note envelopes, which is characteristic of vintage samplers. The may have sampled the sound play a fourth, letting them play or program the melody using only one note. Note that I didn’t sample the sound for my remake, so the envelope times are a little off compared to the original.

I recreated the lead sound using TAL U-NO-LX , a software emulation of the Juno-106 run through Brainworx bx_greenscreamer plugin, which emulates an Ibanez Tubescreamer pedal. Onboard  distortion and overdrive effects in g uitar amp simulators like Guitar Rig or Amplitube would also be suitable. Most of the sound comes from the character of the distortion pedal, so experiment with different models for different sounds. Here is the sound before and after distortion:

• Single Line Clean 00:00
• Added Fourth 00:00
• Tubescreamer 00:00

Da Funk 303

Halfway through the song, the kick drum drops out and an acid bassline is introduced. Interestingly, the bassline wasn’t programmed with Da Funk in mind, it was just one of a few bass lines that Bangalter had programmed on his TB-303, and the one that best fit Da Funk .

“The bassline itself was from a 303 l’d bought in 1993. I’d just made all these random patterns, so when we were looking for a bassline, we listened to some of the ones I’d already programmed and took the one that fit best.” – Daft Punk, Musik (1997)

The Roland TB-303 is a monophonic bass synthesizer originally intended to emulate bass guitars, which it does a terrible job of. It was quickly discontinued, which allowed cheap units to fall into the hands of electronic musicians who favoured it for its aggressive, screeching filter and onboard sequencer.  Because the 303 is such a simple unit with only one oscillator and one envelope, the magic lies in how you program the sequencer. Notes can be set to glide and this can be combined with big octave jumps to create dramatic slides.

303 synth parts are usually recorded by programming a 16-step sequence and changing the filter settings manually while the sequencer plays. The 303’s sequencer only has a three-octave range from C1 to C4 and the Da Funk bassline, which runs from F1 to F4, was likely sequenced in another key and transposed using the 303’s tuning knob to help it fit the key of Da Funk .

Below is my patch for Da Funk using AudioRealism’s ABL3 plugin, an accurate software emulation of the TB-303. Similar to the lead sound, the 303 in Da Funk has been run through a distortion pedal. The ABL3 plugin features onboard distortion which can be added via the small drive and distort knobs at the top-right, which I’ve cranked to almost the maximum settings.

• Da Funk 303 00:00

I also used TAL U-NO-LX to recreate the bass synth. It’s a simple patch using a single sawtooth wave, and the filter os closed almost all the way to let only the bass frequencies through. The ADSR envelope is set up with medium decay and sustain at halfway, which is applied to the filter and VCA to create a subtle plucking motion.

• Bass with Beat 00:00

The brass hit sample that plays through most of the song is from the Zero-G Datafile Three sample CD from 1992, where it appears as track 63, Dance Stabs . All credit to Aguila909 on Reddit for unearthing this sample!

The drums are a mixture of sampled drum breaks and programmed drum machines. The main beat is sampled from Vaughn Mason And Crew’s  Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll  and the drum fill at 0:23 is sampled from Barry White’s  I’m Gonna Love You Just A Little More . The hi-hats that join the beat at 1:43 in my remake are from the Roland TR-909.

• Dance Stab 00:00
• 909 Hats 00:00

Around the World

Around the World is a classic French House banger that featured a Michel Gondry (of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind fame) music video. The song is simple and highly repetitive, featuring only one vocal line repeated 144 times in the full 7:44 album version. There are a minimal number of sounds in the track that get played in various combinations, proving that if the groove is right, repetition can work. Here’s my full remake:

Around the World is built around a simple bass sound that plays three different bass lines throughout the song. The main bassline shares a strong resemblance to the one in Good Times by Chic, whose guitarist Niles Rogers the duo would collaborate with on 2013’s Random Access Memories.

Daft Punk could have recorded the Around the World synth-bass on any of their synths, but I’ve recreated it in TAL U-NO-LX. To create the patch yourself, start with a simple sawtooth wave, lower the filter to 2.7 and crank the resonance to the point where it’s high but not quite screeching (6.89 in TAL U-NO-LX). Add a tiny amount of envelope modulation by raising the ENV fader to 2 and set the ADSR envelope with an attack time of 1, decay of 6 and no sustain to give the patch a subtle pluck. Here are all three basslines played using my TAL U-NO-LX preset:

• Bassline 1 00:00
• Bassline 2 00:00
• Bassline 3 00:00

Funky Leads

Four funky lead sounds play throughout Around the World , with two only appearing during the outro. The main synth lead is a bouncy lead that uses high filter resonance and a synced delay effect to create a funky, rhythmic effect.  I again recreated this sound using TAL U-NO-LX, this time with the square wave DCO waveform selected. Set the filter to 3, resonance to 6 and envelope modulation to halfway. The envelope has attack time set to 2, which works with the resonance setting to create a funky wah-wah sound.

• Organ 1 // Organ 2 00:00

The delay effect is a tempo-synced stereo delay with a 1/8th note delay time in the left channel and a dotted 1/8th note delaying the right channel. The mix level is 25%, feedback is 40%, and I adjusted the delay’s onboard filter to roll off the high frequencies. Here are my settings using Ableton’s Delay effect:

Towards the end of Around the World , the beat drops out and two new outro synth parts get introduced. The two sounds work together to create a musical sequence reminiscent of some later melodies on Discovery , such as Aerodynamic or Veridis Quo , both of which I covered in my Discovery Synth Sounds article.

• Outro Synth 1 00:00
• Outro Synth 2 00:00
• Layered 00:00

Downloads & Related

Thanks for reading! The recreated Juno patches for TAL U-NO-LX are available for download below alongside the Da Funk 303 patch for AudioRealism ABL3.

Download the Presets

Download the synth presets created for this article here. Alternatively, you can find them in the Synth Sounds Collection , a free download containing all of my free synth presets.

Get the Ableton Projects

Get the Ableton Live Projects for these remakes on the Projects Store. All projects have frozen tracks in case of missing plugins and all downloads include stems and MIDI files for use in other DAWs. 

Read Me Next

If you enjoyed this article, be sure to check out my first Daft Punk article, covering the synths from Homework’s follow-up,  Discovery.

Buy Robot Funk

For even more Daft Punk sounds, pick up Robot Funk , my preset pack for Arturia Analog Lab V, featuring faithfully recreated sounds from every Daft Punk album in one pack.

Header artwork by Makarxart  

Comments on Daft Punk’s Homework Synth Sounds

7 thoughts on “daft punk’s <i>homework</i> synth sounds”.

I bought your Robot Funk pack yesterday (and many other previously). I’m not very familiar with all Daft music besides the well known titles like Homework and Get Lucky. Discovering new titles from your Robot Funk, I found the presets very close if not exactly like those in the Daft pieces. The preset pack recreates very well the Daft sound world (geist) with formant (voice) colored or wah like synths in many variants. They’re often, not always, on the bright side (brightness macro completely on). Playing with the macros offers interesting variation not stricly daftian. Many basses have a “round” sound missing in many bass sounds found in Arturia presets. They’re close to electric bass sounds. I may be completely wrong, of course.

If I may add, You’ve already proven your mastery of Jupiter in RM-Europa. All your Juno presets are great. In the Emu set, Synth Talk 5 is my preferred one.

Thanks! Synth Talk 5 is my favourite of the “Human After All” sounds as well, it’s the one I used in the “Humans” demo.

Oh god! Thanks for this. Great you share all this knowledge

The depth of research and polish you consistently produce in these blog breakdowns just astonishes me! SO very glad I joined your Patreon.

Hope to see more DaftPunk in the future

Thanks Amul!

this is fire..

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“I’m told they’re working on it, it’s coming out of the locker”: Daft Punk drummer raises hopes that a new album could be on the way

Quinn reveals details of 2018 sessions and says that there’s a record that “sits in limbo”

Ironically, it feels like we’ve heard more from Daft Punk since they broke up, in 2021, than we did in the years leading up to their split . They’re reissued albums - Homework and Random Access Memories - joined TikTok and, in the case of Thomas Bangalter, released solo material . 

What they haven’t done, of course, is put out a new record, but if Random Access Memories session drummer Quinn is to be believed, that could could be a genuine possibility.

In an interview with alt.news 26:46 , Quinn says of the album that Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo are said to have started working on in 2018: “I keep checking in. I’m told they’re working on it, it’s coming out of the locker." That’s a plot twist if ever we heard one, and the drummer has a little more to share, too.

“On ‘RAM’, I was pretty much the last person to come in on the record,” recalls Quinn. “All this work had been done, and I was just sort of doing some of the glue, icing in there. And then the next record they were working on, I was the first first person, the very first person, literally they were working on ideas.”

Describing the scene, Quinn goes on to say: “So Thomas had this keyboard, and actually he had a computer program, I forget what it was, and he was just experimenting. He was just hitting things; we were literally just trying to get vibes across. He was on the mixing board, I’m out in the studio on my weird drum set, and he would just hit a thing [makes beat noises] and whatever he would give me, I would answer and try to come up with something. We did that for a lot of pieces - really, some amazing things. And a lot of times I would be so excited.”

Sounds fun, and it turns out that, as well as “tons” of this more experimental stuff, Quinn was also asked to play “more ‘normal’ drums - you know, the ‘disco’” - before the arrival of another Random Access Memories alumnus.

“ Paul Jackson Jr , who’s played guitar with everybody, came in and he played with me, and then I think one other guy came in doing winds.”

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Other recollections from Quinn include him playing some ‘wacky’ drums, and Bangalter sitting at a piano that sounded electronic.

“That record in particular - the unnamed record - I think will be a lot of spontaneous things in there,” he says. “I remember playing this one thing - my piano board, that’s the insides of a piano. I put my kick drum pedal on the strings and played it like a kick drum. I remember those guys really loving that. I don’t know if it’ll make the record as it was the craziest, weird sounding thing.”

Quinn goes on to report that he recorded with Daft Punk for four or five days, and that the lost record currently “sits in limbo”. It might sound surprising that he’s talking so openly about it now, but he confirms that he sought the band’s permission to do so - “because they’re very secretive, as you know” - and was given the green light.

Which is certainly intriguing; perhaps Daft Punk have no intention of the releasing the album and are just having a little fun with us, or maybe a new record really is on the way? Your guess is as good as ours, but’s a mark of their enduring popularity that the merest suggestion of new material is enough to send fans into a frenzy. If the idea was to everyone’s attention, it’s job done.

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I’m the Deputy Editor of MusicRadar, having worked on the site since its launch in 2007. I previously spent eight years working on our sister magazine, Computer Music. I’ve been playing the piano, gigging in bands and failing to finish tracks at home for more than 30 years, 24 of which I’ve also spent writing about music and the ever-changing technology used to make it. 

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December 2, 2018

Daft Punk ’s Homework is, in its pure existence, a study in contradictions. The debut album from Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo arrived in 1997, right around the proliferation of big-beat and electronica—a twin-headed hydra of dance music fads embraced by the music industry following the commercialization of early ’90s rave culture—but when it came to presumptive contemporaries from those pseudo-movements, Homework shared Sam Goody rack space and not much else. Daft Punk’s introduction to the greater world also came at a time when French electronic music was gaining international recognition, from sturdy discotheque designs to jazzy, downtempo excursions—music that sounded miles away from Homework ’s rude, brutalist house music.

In the 21 years since Homework ’s release, Daft Punk have strayed far from its sound with globe-traversing electronic pop that, even while incorporating other elements of dance music subgenres, has more often than not kept house music’s building blocks at arms’ length. 2001’s Discovery was effectively electronic pop-as-Crayola box, with loads of chunky color and front-and-center vocals that carried massive mainstream appeal. Human After All from 2005 favored dirty guitars and repetitive, Teutonic sloganeering, while the pair took a nostalgia trip through the history of electronic pop itself for 2013’s Random Access Memories . Were it not for a few choice Homework tracks that pop up on 2007’s exhilarating live document Alive 2007 , one might assume that Homework has been lost in the narrative that’s formed since its release—that of Daft Punk as robot-helmeted superstar avatars, rather than as irreverent house savants.

But even as the straightforward and strident club fare on Homework remains singular within Daft Punk’s catalog, the record also set the stage for the duo’s career to this very day—a massively successful and still-going ascent to pop iconography, built on the magic trick-esque ability to twist the shapes of dance music’s past to resemble something seemingly futuristic. Whether you’re talking about Bangalter and Homem-Christo’s predilection for global-kitsch nostalgia, their canny and self-possessed sense of business savvy, or their willingness to wear their influences on their sleeve like ironed-on jean-jacket patches—it all began with Homework .

It couldn’t possibly make more sense that a pair of musicians whose most recent album sounds like a theme park ride through pop and electronic music’s past got their big break at Disneyland. It was 1993, and schoolboy friends Bangalter and Homem-Christo’s rock band with future Phoenix guitarist Laurent Brancowitz, Darlin’—named after a track from the 1967 Beach Boys album Wild Honey that the three shared an affinity for—had disbanded after a year of existence that included a few songs released on Stereolab ’s Duophonic label. (Melody Maker writer Dave Jennings notoriously referred to their songs as possessing “a daft punky thrash,” which led to the pair assuming the Daft Punk moniker.)

While attending a rave in Paris, Bangalter and Homem-Christo had a chance encounter with Glasgow DJ/producer Stuart McMillan, the co-founder of the Soma Recordings dance label; like any aspiring musicians would, they gave him a demo tape of early Daft Punk music. The following year Soma released Daft Punk’s debut single “The New Wave,” a booming and acid-tinged instrumental that would later evolve into Homework cut “Alive.”

A follow-up, “Da Funk” b/w “Rollin’ & Scratchin’,” hit shops in 1995; according to a Muzik profile two years later, its initial 2,000-platter pressing was “virtually ignored” until rave-electronica bridge-gap veterans the Chemical Brothers started airing out its A-side during DJ sets. A major-label bidding war ensued, with Virgin as the victor which re-released “Da Funk” as a proper single in 1996 with non- Homework track “Musique” as its B-side. During this time, Bangalter and Homem-Christo casually worked on the 16 tunes that would make up Homework in the former’s bedroom, utilizing what The Guardian ’s Ben Osborne referred to in 2001 as “ low technology equipment ”—two sequencers, a smattering of samplers, synths, drum machines, and effects, with an IOMEGA zip drive rounding out their setup.

Bangalter and Homem-Christo’s work ethic while assembling the bulk of Homework was of the type that makes sloths appear highly efficient by comparison: no more than eight hours a week, over the course of five months. “We have not spent much time on Homework ,” Bangalter casually bragged to POP . “The main thing is that it sounds good… We have no need to make music every day.” The songs were crafted with the intention of being released as singles (“We do not really want to make albums,” Bangalter claimed in the same interview), Homework ’s eventual sequencing a literal afterthought after the pair realized they had enough material to evenly fill four sides of two vinyl platters. “Balance,” the pair said in unison when asked about Homework ’s format-specific sequencing in Dance Music Authority following the album’s release. “It is done for balance.”

Indeed, Homework is practically built to be consumed in side-long chunks; taking the album in at a single 75-minute listen can feel like running a 5K right after eating an entire pizza. Its A-side kicks off with the patient build of “Daftendirekt”—itself a live-recording excerpt of introductory music used during a Daft Punk set at 1995’s I Love Techno festival in Ghent—and concludes with the euphoric uplift of “Phoenix”; the B-side opens with the literal oceanic washes of “Fresh” before stretching its legs with the loopy, Gershon Kingsley-interpolating “Around the World” and the screeching fist-pump anthem “Rollin’ & Scratchin’.” The third side keeps things light with the flashy, instructional “Teachers” before getting truly twisted on “Rock’n Roll,” and the fourth side takes a few rubbery detours before landing on the full-bodied “Alive”—the thicker and meaner final form of “The New Wave”—and, quixotically, a slight and rewound “Da Funk” return, aptly titled “Funk Ad.”

Bangalter explained to POP that the title of Homework carries a few meanings: “You always do homework in the bedroom,” he stated, referencing the album’s homespun origins before elaborating on the didactic exercise that creating the album represented: “We see it as a training for our upcoming discs. We would as well have been able to call it Lesson or Learning .” That instructional nature is reflexive when it comes to listeners’ presumptive relationship with the album, as Homework practically represents a how-to for understanding and listening to house music.

Nearly every track opens with a single sonic element—more often than not, that steady 4/4 rhythm inextricably tied to house music—adding every successive element of the track patiently, like a played-in-reverse YouTube video showcasing someone taking apart a gadget to see what’s inside. Such a pedagogic approach can have its pitfalls; there’s always a risk of coming across as too rigid, and Daft Punk arguably fell victim to such dull, fussy didacticism later in their careers. But they sidestep such follies on Homework by way of the purely pleasurable music they carefully assembled, piece-by-piece, for whoever was listening.

Under the umbrella of house music, Homework incorporates a variety of sounds snatched from various musical subgenres—G-funk’s pleasing whine, the cut-up vocal-sample style of proto-UK garage made popular by frequent Daft Punk collaborator Todd Edwards , disco’s delicious synths and glittery sweep—to craft a true musical travelogue that also hinted at the widescreen sonic scope they’d take later in their careers. Above all, the album represents a love letter to black American pop music that’s reverberated through Daft Punk’s career to date—from Janet Jackson ’s sample of “Daftendirekt” on her 2008 Discipline track “So Much Betta” to Will.i.am’s failed attempt to remix “Around the World” the year previous, as well as the duo’s continued collaborations with artists ranging from Pharrell to Kanye West and the Weeknd .

The spirit of house music’s Midwestern originators is also literally and musically invoked throughout. Over the winding house-party groove of “Teachers,” Daft Punk pay homage to their formative influences, ranging from George Clinton and Dr. Dre to Black house and techno pioneers like Lil Louis, DJ Slugo, and Parris Mitchell—and in a meta twist, the song’s structure itself is a literal homage to Mitchell’s 1995 Dance Mania! single “Ghetto Shout Out,” an interpolation clearly telegraphed in the middle of Daft Punk’s astounding contribution to BBC’s Essential Mix series in 1997 .

Alongside Daft Punk’s preoccupations with American popular music, Homework also carries a very specific and politically pointed evocation of their native Paris in “Revolution 909,” the fourth and final single released from Homework that doubled as a critique of anti-rave measures taken by the French government after Jacques Chirac assumed power in 1995. “I don’t think it’s the music they’re after—it’s the parties,” Homem-Christo told Dance Music Authority , with Bangalter adding, “They pretend [the issue is] drugs, but I don’t think it’s the only thing. There’s drugs everywhere, but they probably wouldn’t have a problem if the same thing was going on at a rock concert, because that’s what they understand. They don’t understand this music which is really violent and repetitive, which is house; they consider it dumb and stupid.”

“Revolution 909” opens with ambient club noise, followed by the intrusion of police sirens and intimidating megaphone’d orders to “stop the music and go home.” The accompanying Roman Coppola-helmed music video was even more explicit in depicting the frequent clash between ravers and law enforcement that marked dance music’s rise to the mainstream in the early-to-mid-’90s; amidst a kitschy instructional video on making tomato sauce, a pair of cops attempt to disperse a rave, a young woman escaping one of their grasps after he becomes distracted by a tomato sauce stain on his own lapel.

It’s been rumored, but never quite confirmed, that Bangalter himself appears in the video for “Revolution 909”—a slice of speculation gesturing towards the fact that Daft Punk’s Homework era was the time in which the duo began embracing anonymity. The now-iconic robot helmets wouldn’t be conceived of until the Discovery era, and the magazine stories that came during Daft Punk’s pre- Homework days were typically accompanied by a fresh-faced photo of the pair; during Homework ’s promotional cycle, however, they donned a variety of masks to obscure their visages, including frog and pig-themed disguises .

In conversation with Simon Reynolds for The New York Times in 2013, the pair cited Brian De Palma’s glam-rock masterpiece Phantom of the Paradise as artistic inspiration for their decision to retain visual anonymity, and Daft Punk’s press-shy tendencies (since Homework , the interviews they’ve chosen to take part in have been few and far between) are firmly situated in a long tradition of letting the music do the talking in dance culture—from the sci-fi evasiveness of Drexciya and Aphex Twin ’s relative reclusiveness to the preferred reticence of Burial and his contemporaries in the UK bass scene.

But refusing to turn themselves into rock stars upon Homework ’s release also afforded Daft Punk a crucial element that has undoubtedly aided their perpetual ascent to the present-day: control. Retaining a sense of anonymity was but one of the conditions that the pair struck with Virgin upon signing to the label before Homework ’s release; while the music they released under the label (before signing to Columbia in 2013) was licensed exclusively to Virgin, they owned it through their own Daft Trax production and management company.

But Homework proved influential in other, more explicitly musical ways. G-house, an emergent dance subgenre in the mid-2010s dominated by acts like French duo Amine Edge & Dance, borrows liberally from Daft Punk’s own musical mash of hip-hop’s tough sounds and house music’s pounding appeal; the dirty bloghouse bruisers of Parisian collective Ed Banger—founded by Pedro Winter aka Busy P, who acted as the group’s manager until 2008—would literally not exist were it not for Homework , and that goes double for the party-hardy bloghouse micro-movement of the mid-late 2000s, which Ed Banger’s artists practically dominated. Parisian duo Justice , in particular, owe practically the entirety of their 2007 landmark † to the scraping tension of “Rollin’ & Scratchin’.”

It’s tempting, too, to tie a connective thread between Homework and the brash sounds that proliferated during the peak heyday of the financial descriptor-cum-music genre known as EDM; close your eyes while listening to “Alive”’s big-tent sweep and try not to imagine the tune destroying a festival crowd. But for all of Homework ’s aggressive charms, it’s also retained a homespun intimacy in comparison to how positively widescreen Daft Punk’s music became afterwards. “We focus on the illusion because giving away how it’s done instantly shuts down the sense of excitement and innocence,” Bangalter told Pitchfork in 2013, and the fact that two Beach Boys fans fiddling around in their bedroom could conceive of something so generously in-your-face and playful as Homework might still stand as Daft Punk’s greatest illusion yet.

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