However, the album's first single, 'Get Lucky', featuring disco legend Nile Rogers on guitar and Neptunes singer Pharrell Williams, instantly became the largest global hit of the year so far. Their project could easily have been dismissed as the folly of two French musicians about to reach middle age, wanting to relive some of the excitement of their teenage years.
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For Random Access Memories they had, they announced, gone back to the recording methods of the '70s and '80s, which involved not only a huge recording budget, but also the employment of great musicians from the era, and the use of high-end recording studios full of analogue equipment, all in order "to make music that others might one day sample”. Since their classic first two albums, Homework (1997) and Discovery (2001), Daft Punk have been regarded as leading lights of electronic dance music, yet they have waxed lyrical about the music of the '70s and early '80s, which they claim represents "the zenith of a certain craftsmanship in sound recording” and criticised music made with laptops, which "aren't really music instruments”. RAM is the manifestation of a mind-bogglingly ambitious master plan, which they unveiled in bits and pieces in interviews during the pre-release promotional campaign. If Random Access Memories turns out to have such an effect, it will be exactly what Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo had in mind. The vast majority of reviews have been ecstatic, and if the album's sales also continue to go through the roof, it will be hard for a music industry to ignore the idea that spending serious time and money on making an album sound fantastic and marketing it properly might actually, after all, be a profitable proposition. The album was more than two years in the making, spread out over five years, and the result of this gargantuan investment of money, time and effort is that Random Access Memories is, even when heard in lo-res digital formats, arguably the best-sounding album of the 21st Century so far. Seven figures is, by any standard, a staggering amount of money to spend on the creation of an album, and directly challenges the music industry's current cheese-paring business model. Peter Franco (left) with Mick Guzauski during the recording of Random Access Memories at Henson Studios. RAM is one of the best engineered records in many years,” and "It sounds like a million dollars.” The latter comment was written before Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter admitted in a post-album release interview in Rolling Stone that he and his partner, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, had, in fact, spent more than that. Mainstream music press reviewers rarely comment on production, but they have made an exception for RAM, gushing "It's all rendered with an amazing level of detail, with no expense spared.
Most of all, there's the way in which RAM was made and consequently sounds. The marketing campaign was one case in point, and it has also been noted that the album is an "all-out war on the current single-song consumption model”, with iTunes streaming the entire album as one body of work before its release, and Daft Punk refusing to tour the album, preferring to allow their studio handiwork to speak for itself.
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What's more, Random Access Memories sees Daft Punk throwing down the gauntlet at the entire music industry, challenging almost all current preconceptions about the way in which music is made and how to present and sell it.
Indeed, its impact is so strong that there's already talk of it becoming one of the best-selling albums of the decade. Mick Guzauski and Peter Franco were with them all the way.įollowing one of the most ingenious, expensive and lengthy album marketing campaigns in living memory, Daft Punk's Random Access Memories looks set to become the best-selling album of the year. Daft Punk spent four years and over a million dollars on their quest to revisit the golden age of record production.
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