Discovery Turns 20 - Stereogum

When Daft Punk announced their breakup earlier this week, they did it through iconography.

Since Daft Punk had the best videos, nobody much cared what they looked like.

Daft Punk had figured out the dance-music equivalent of Kiss facepaint — a whole new evolved-Kraftwerk aesthetic that let them be facelessly anonymous and grandly theatrical at the same time.

The new makeover mattered because Daft Punk’s second album was a big deal.

In the US, where Daft Punk’s form of house music was utterly detached from the pop mainstream, Daft Punk were still a big cult act whose videos stayed in late-night MTV rotation, and Homework went gold.

The duo’s sophomore LP Discovery — released 20 years ago today — paid off all that hype.

For a good solid year and a half after the release of Discovery, when someone would play “One More Time” in any kind of communal setting, shit would get wild.

“One More Time” built a whole world out of the horn fanfare from Eddie Johns’ 1979 disco-funk obscurity “More Spell On You.” The late New Jersey house producer Romanthony, a hero to Daft Punk, sang gospel-informed party exhortations through the same kind of early Auto-Tune filter that Cher had just used on “Believe” while drum-machines skitter-thumped and aqueous organs sighed.

“One More Time” didn’t have a pop-song structure, but it had its own kind of architecture.

This stuff had emotional resonance; back when they still talked to magazines sometimes, Daft Punk explained that the album was a tribute to the music that they loved as kinds in the ’70s and ’80s.

You can hear all sorts of echoes in the album — not just the disco implied in the title, but also shiny plastic early-’80s synth-funk, smirky soft rock, wheedly hair-metal, starry-eyed prog, new-romantic twinkle-sighs.

With Discovery, Daft Punk fully embraced the idea of the album — of a holistic cohesive listening experience with peaks and valleys.

On “Face To Face,” Todd Edwards, another New Jersey house producer who Daft Punk regarded with awe, sang about distance and hidden urges.

On “Digital Love,” Daft Punk’s truest lighters-up moment, the robots sang the lovelorn lyrics that Chicago producer DJ Sneak had written for them: “Why don’t you play the gaaaaaaame?”.

Nobody — including Daft Punk — has ever managed to fuse those two urges in quite the same way.

The first time I played Discovery straight through, the song that stood out the most was track four, “Harder Better Faster Stronger.” This was the one moment where Daft Punk went for the full electro-rumble vocoder effect, bringing the same sort of silly futurism that had made “Around The World” so irresistible.

In the US, Daft Punk were still a cult act when Discovery came out, but they were rocking stadiums by the end of the decade

(Their 2007 Alive Tour date at Brooklyn’s KeySpan Park, the minor-league stadium in Coney Island, remains the single greatest stadium-rock spectacle I have ever witnessed.) Daft Punk’s later singles became actual no-shit American chart-pop hits, and people were slightly bummed when they didn’t show up at the Weeknd’s Super Bowl Halftime Show mere weeks before they announced their breakup

We now know, definitively, that Discovery is the best album that Daft Punk have ever made and will ever make