Daft Punk’s debut album ‘Homework’ turns 25
Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo were at a point of no return in the mid-1990s. Burned out by the generic rock music made by their previous band Darlin’ and fascinated by the wave of techno music that was taking over French clubs, the duo began plundering their record collections and plugging in samplers to try and stitch together their own compositions.
They didn’t exactly fit in with their contemporaries. While most DJs went for dense mixes and overstuffed production, Bangalter and Homem-Christo were remarkably restrained, often relying on subtle changes in dynamics and fidelity to create their songs. With a “less is more” approach that allowed them to stretch tracks out, the pair collected 16 of their favourite compositions to create their debut LP as Daft Punk, Homework.
Homework predates most of the identifiable aspects of Daft Punk: the obsession with disco, the embrace of analogue equipment alongside modern recording techniques, and even the robot masks that became the band’s signature look. In those respects, Homework represents Daft Punk at their most raw and impressionable.
Take, for instance, the righteous drive of ‘Fresh’. With little more than two chord vamp and some ocean sound effects, the duo were wringing out four minutes of song with just four bars of actual music. Detractors will call it repetitive, but Homework is so encased in its own world that you never seem to notice just how little is actually going.
Perhaps wisely, the band mostly stayed away from vocals, as it would have only highlighted the album’s bare-bones construction. But for one track, the band acquiesced. ‘Around the World’ still plays like a magic trick: seven minutes of just three words that don’t sound monotonous or grating. Expertly bringing back the title phrase in between breakdowns, Daft Punk actually constructed something dangerously close to a pop song.
Bangalter and Homem-Christo admitted that the album was initially just a series of standalone singles, and the lack of cohesion between tracks is still the final product’s biggest flaw. But since they weren’t experienced enough yet to be too clever, the duo stay in the same sonic space for most of the runtime, creating a signature sound almost by accident. To the legions of ravers who found the album so captivating, it was hard to say exactly why Daft Punk were so different from their peers. But Homework feels so much more satisfying than the insistent mania of albums by Fatboy Slim or Moby.
Even though the electronic push and pull of Homework can sound unrefined compared to the slick house-infused sounds of Discovery or the futuristic disco thump of Random Access Memory, Daft Punk’s debut still resonates. Chalk it up to the fact that this wasn’t a pair of rockers trying to jump ship to modern trends. Instead, Homework sees two music obsessives trying to find a new world to explore.
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