Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter Scores Soundtrack For Film ‘Daaaaaalí!’
Having previously contributed the score to Quentin Dupieux (Mr. Ozi)’s latest comedy film, Daaaaaalí! Former Daft Punk star Thomas Bangalter he has announced the soundtrack’s official release on 7 February via Ed Banger.
Daaaaaalí!, which premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival, features a variety of French actors all playing the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí. It will receive a theatrical release in France on 7 February.
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Due to their respective efforts in the French electronic scene of the late ’90s, Bangalter and Dupieux have been longtime friends; Bangalter previously cameoed (sans his usual Daft Punk mask) in Dupieux’s 2014 film Reality.
Bangalter previously released Mythologies, his first album post-Daft Punk, in 2023. During an appearance on BBC’s The First Time with Matt Everett podcast last year, the artist said he was “relieved” that the Daft Punk era was over and expanded on the duo’s 2021 breakup.
He added: “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.”
Daft Punk shared a 10th anniversary edition of Random Access Memories last year, which they followed with a drumless version of the album in November. The reissue of Random Access Memories returned to the top of the Billboard Dance/Electronic albums chart in May 2023.
The album’s anniversary edition also included 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 last year. 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.
Buy Daft Punk vinyl, CDs and merch at the Dig! store.