Cole Cuchna

How would Daft Punk, the robots who built their entire career on electronic music made on samplers and drum machines, create an entire project that didn't just conclude with humanity, but fully embraced it from start to finish?

Well, they did the last thing anyone would ever expect of course.

They totally abandoned the electronic instruments that defined them, stepping away from the grid of bedroom sample loops and drum machines and into real studios, with real people, real musicians.

They exchanged programming for human performance.

They replaced electronic perfection for human imperfection.

And in doing so, they created what would become their final statement.

A definitive conclusion to the story of Daft Punk and a celebration of the human experience captured and immortalized in recorded music.

They called it Random Access Memories.

Daft Punk's Random Access Memories was released on May 17, 2013.

According to Tomas and Guiman, the album began like most of their previous work, with the duo building grooves from loops and samples.

But this time, something felt off, and they found themselves dissatisfied with the results.

That dissatisfaction led to them asking themselves a series of deeper questions about the music they made,

Toma told Billboard, "...what is the magic in samples?

Why for the last 20 years have producers and musicians been extracting these tiny snippets of audio from vinyl records?

What kind of magic did it contain?

Because harmonically, the samples are just an F minor or a G flat, something not so special.

It occurred to us it's probably a collection of so many different things."

of amazing performances, the studio, the craft, the hardware, recording engineers, mixing engineers, the whole production process of these records that took a lot of effort and time to make back then.

It was not an easy task.

It took a certain craftsmanship."