Cole Cuchna

What once began as an underground genre, born in clubs by black, queer, and minority communities, was now breaking into the mainstream at a massive scale.

And if Daft Punk were following conventional logic, they would have capitalized on that moment.

With their momentum at an all-time high and electronic music exploding globally, the formula would have been pretty straightforward.

Release a new project, return to the sound of discovery, and do it quickly.

But as you know by this point in the season, Daft Punk never followed conventional logic.

The only predictable thing about them is their unpredictability.

That whatever comes next will never be what anyone expects.

And that holds true here too, because after the Alive Tour wrapped in December 2007, Daft Punk disappeared again, for three years.

And when they finally re-emerged, this is how they reintroduced themselves.

This is the overture from Daft Punk's score to 2010's Tron Legacy.

The film is a sequel to the original Tron from 1982, a groundbreaking sci-fi film that imagined a world inside a computer system at a time when digital technology was still in its infancy.

Tron also featured a now historic score by electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos, one of the earliest adopters of the synthesizer and bowcoder.

Tron's history of exploring themes of technology paired with cutting edge electronic music made Daft Punk an obvious choice for the sequel.

However, Disney initially only approached the duo to contribute a handful of songs to the soundtrack, not to compose the entire score.

And you can't really blame them.

While Daft Punk did have experience with film, they had never actually scored one, let alone a big budget sequel to a coveted Disney franchise.

Hell, they hadn't even made an album in a proper studio yet.

All three of the records had been recorded at home.

But being novices was exactly what attracted them to the project.

So they pushed to do the whole thing.