Daft Punk’s ‘Random Access Memories’ Returns To Top Of Billboard Electronic Chart
Daft Punk‘s much-acclaimed Random Access Memories has returned to the top of the Billboard Dance/Electronic albums chart.
The legendary French duo, who broke up in 2021, released a new anniversary edition of their fourth and final album, which first came out a decade ago last week.
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Since the release of the new edition, streams of Random Access Memories have gone up by over 1,000 per cent, as Billboard report, with the album now sitting atop the Dance/Electronic albums chart.
Released as part of the anniversary edition is a previously unreleased song featuring The Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas, titled Infinity Repeating. Daft Punk premiered the song at Paris’ famous Pompidou Center on 11 May. The Pompidou Center has a special place in Daft Punk’s history: in 1992, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo attended their first rave at the museum when they were still teenagers.
The new version of Random Access Memories also includes studio outtakes of the album opener Give Life Back To Music, vocoder tests of Lose Yourself To Dance and the song Horizon, which previously only appeared on the Japanese version of the CD.
In other Daft Punk news, earlier this year Thomas Bangalter explained the reasons behind the duo’s split in 2021. “My concerns about the rise of artificial intelligence go beyond its use in music creation,” he said, explaining that fans often misunderstood their music.
“[In Daft Punk,] we tried to use these machines to express something extremely moving that a machine cannot feel, but a human can. We were always on the side of humanity and not on the side of technology,” he continued. “As much as I love this character, the last thing I would want to be, in the world we live in, in 2023, is a robot.”
Following the split of Daft Punk, Bangalter announced his first solo album in over 20 years, Mythologies – which was originally conceived as a ballet score and performed at Bordeaux’s Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux last July.
Buy Daft Punk vinyl and merch at the Dig! store.