Grammy-Winning Music Duo Daft Punk Break Up After 28 Years
Daft Punk, the French electronic music duo, who are known for concealing their identities behind a robot concept, have split.
The pair announced the split with a YouTube video featuring a clip from their film Electroma, featuring an intertitle with the dates 1993-2021. In the video, the pair bid each other farewell in a desert before one of them walks away and self-destructs. Their publicist Kathryn Frazier confirmed the split to Pitchfork but gave no reason for the breakup.
The split marks the end of the partnership between Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter who formed the group in Paris in 1993. They were one of the most influential acts in dance music history.
Their debut album, 1997’s Homework, was a dance music landmark, featuring classic singles “Around the World” and “Da Funk.” By the release of its follow-up, Discovery, in 2001, the duo had taken to making public appearances in the robot outfits that became their trademark. The singles “One More Time” and “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” cemented them as global superstars.
Daft Punk’s fourth and final studio album Random Access Memories became Daft Punk’s first album to top the US Billboard 200, selling over 339,000 copies in its first week of sales. It has since been certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). It also topped the charts in twenty other countries. Its lead single “Get Lucky” was a critical and commercial success, topping the charts in over thirty countries and becoming one of the best-selling digital singles of all time. The album went on to win several awards at the 2014 Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year and Record of the Year for “Get Lucky”.
In 2016, Daft Punk gained their first number one on the Billboard Hot 100 with the song “Starboy”, a collaboration with The Weeknd. Rolling Stone ranked them No. 12 on its list of the 20 Greatest Duos of All Time.
