Cole Cuchna

Mixer Magazine celebrated the album's experimental spirit as, quote, brave and completely commendable, while the A.V.

Club dismissed parts of it as, quote, not so much fun as it is silly, unquote.

But perhaps the clearest contrast between past and present comes from Pitchfork, which originally gave Discovery a tepid 6.4 in 2001, only to revise that score to a perfect 10 in 2021, admitting that, quote, the original review is invalidated by the historic record, unquote.

Indeed, discovery is great art, and history has a way of rewarding great art even when it's not fully understood in the moment.

Now, along with the music, the Discovery era is also responsible for birthing Daft Punk's now iconic robot personas.

Thomas and Guimond spent months developing their helmets with special effects artist Tony Gardner, who worked on films such as The Addams Family and Hocus Pocus.

Thomas' helmet was inspired by two of his favorite films, 1976's Phantom of the Paradise, which featured a silver-masked musician as the lead character,

and 1951's The Day the Earth Stood Still, whose 8-foot-tall humanoid robot character donned a futuristic silver helmet.

To reflect his talkative nature, Thomas' helmet originally featured an LED panel that could display words he typed into a controller strapped to his arm.

Guimond's helmet was inspired by NASA's Apollo-era gold-faced space helmets.

And because he was more reserved, Guimond's vertical LED panel didn't display words but rather abstract shapes and designs.

When it was time for Discovery's press run, Daft Punk fully committed to these robot characters, showing up to interviews in full costume and relaying their origin story, how their transformation was due to a sampler exploding in their studio on September 9, 1999 at exactly 9.09am.

an homage to the Roland TR-909 drum machine.

As we discussed back on episode 1, Thomas and Guimond's robotic transformation caused by a technical malfunction played on the very real fear around Y2K at the time, an event that came to symbolize just how intertwined humans had become with their technological creations.

That relationship was inherent in Touma and Giman's robot characters, but they wouldn't really develop that theme until their next album cycle.

Instead, they spent years working on an anime film that was scored entirely by Discovery in track order, 2003's Interstellar 4-5, the story of the secret star system.

As I've mentioned a few times this season, Daft Punk conceived Discovery as part of a larger visual project from the very beginning,

Their original idea of a live-action film eventually evolved into an anime, leading them to collaborate with the highly respected Japanese director Leiji Matsumoto, the creator behind many of the cartoons Touma and Gimon loved as children.

In this sense, working with one of their childhood heroes fits perfectly within Discovery's core theme of 70s nostalgia, an experience Touma described as a quote, childhood dream come true.

The film tells the story of an alien band from a distant galaxy who are kidnapped by an evil human music producer who's seeking supernatural power by collecting 5,555 gold records.