The Making of Discovery: How Daft Punk Reinvented Themselves

Discovery was released in February 2001 and represented the most significant creative gamble of Daft Punk's career. Homework had established them as serious artists within electronic music, respected by DJs and producers and with a substantial cult following. Discovery threw most of that context away and aimed somewhere else entirely.

The record was built on samples and vocoder in ways that were more indebted to 1970s and 1980s pop and disco than to house or techno. It was bright where Homework had been dark, melodic where it had been rhythmic, unabashedly commercial where the debut had maintained a certain underground credibility. "One More Time," the lead single, opened with a lyric about celebration delivered through heavy pitch correction and was almost insultingly accessible by the standards of where Daft Punk had come from.

The critical reaction was mixed. Some reviewers heard Discovery as a sell-out, a retreat from the formal rigour of Homework toward something easier and more digestible. Others heard it as the braver record: more ambitious in its emotional directness, more willing to be loved rather than respected.

Time has settled the argument. Discovery is now widely considered one of the defining albums of the 2000s, a record that influenced a generation of producers and listeners and that sounds, more than two decades on, completely of its moment and completely outside it at the same time.

The album's companion piece, Interstella 5555, the full-length anime film directed by Leiji Matsumoto, gave the record a visual world that most albums never get. Watching the film alongside the album was the way millions of people first encountered Discovery - and it shaped how the music felt in ways that are still hard to separate from the songs themselves.

Explore the songs that came out of it: One More Time, Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, and Digital Love.