GQ Profiles Daft Punk

Daft Punk continues their press takeover with their GQ feature as part of their Random Access Memories campaign. The editorial piece places the French duo in context, offering a retrospect of their decade-spanning career as well as the main musical influences for their upcoming new offering, which is due May 17:

It’s called Random Access Memories—they whisper the title across the table, because it’s February and no one else knows this yet, and because with Daft Punk nearly everything is a secret. The record is only Daft Punk’s fourth in sixteen years, not counting the soundtrack work they did on Disney’s 2010 sequel to Tron, and the first that the two men, who recorded their first three albums at home (two in Bangalter’s bedroom, one in his living room), have made in a proper studio. It’s a big and lush and opulent ’70s-disco record, glamorous in places and almost mournful in others, like something a heartbroken vacuum cleaner might drive around to at night in Detroit. It’s got choirs and flutes and some of the same guys who played on Thriller and Off the Wall, and Panda Bear from Animal Collective, and Nile Rodgers from Chic, and a gang of other collaborators—Italian disco god Giorgio Moroder, “Rainbow Connection” guy Paul Williams, pianist Chilly Gonzales, house titan Todd Edwards, the Strokes’ Julian Casablancas, Pharrell Williams singing about sex and ancient Greek mythology. It sounds like it cost about a million dollars to make, if not more, an estimate they don’t deny but also won’t confirm.

Read the entire article here.