Staff Writer
Daft Punk is set to release their fourth studio album, “No End” sometime this spring. “Sometime this spring” because aside from the French electronic music duo and their peers, next to know one knows when the album drops since there has been no actual announcement of a release date. Under the moniker Daft Punk, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo have both changed the face of electronic music without so much as even showing their own. Mixing a diverse palette of samples from the golden age of funk and disco with the genres of house and techno, Daft Punk has created and refined their own stylistic form of electronic music that can only be attributed to the Daft Punk sound.
The Daft Punk team has been promoting the imminence of the new album the same way Kubrick used his monoliths in “2001: A Space Odyssey” to keep his audiences interested; by making it apparent something is about to happen, without giving any specifics. Just last November for the first time in several-yes several-years the official Daft Punk website updated from their original Daft Punk logo to a picture of the duo’s helmets, which was a big deal. Then, to make an even bigger splash, the website was updated a second time with a Columbia Records symbol slapped on the bottom right corner of the photo, splash. The updated website was soon followed by their monumental 15 second ad during a “Saturday Night Live” commercial break that featured a glitzed-out version of the band’s logo and the helmets from their new website, all the while what is to be assumed to be a snippet of a new Daft Punk track playing in the background. “This is the musical equivalent of a hot chick flashing a boob at you then running off,” said Clarisse Hazel, who as a 20-year-old fan of Daft Punk, sought to prolong the goodness of the ad by listening to the 10 minute loop of the ad’s music available on YouTube. The snippet has since been at the mercy of denizens of the Internets, who have produced a 10 hour loop of the 15 second snippet, to which I have been listening for the duration of time I’ve been writing this.
The new album is rumored to feature musical greats like disco legend Nile Rodgers and electronic-music pioneer Noah Lennox who have been hinting to music media outlets of working with the enigmatic pair. Rodgers and Lennox have mentioned working on Daft Punk’s newest project, but aside from Rodgers’ who has hinted the album’s release this year, both have not mentioned any other information beyond their collaboration. Daft Punk has been producing some of the most innovative and mind-blowing electronic music our generation heard since the early ’90s, and with the name of the next album rumored to be dubbed “No End” it seems as though the two plan to churn out and let the people hear what will be the release of the year, if not the decade.
