Cole Cuchna

Tomas said the album was not supposed to make you feel good, comparing its unpolished nature to, quote, a stone that's unworked, unquote.

They gave themselves just six weeks to make the album primarily using just two guitars, two drum machines, a vocoder, and an 8-track recorder.

Tomas framed this intentionally constrained approach as an attempt to find quote, infinity inside the square, a way of forcing innovation by limiting available resources.

The result is something that feels like it was made by a traditional band, where each member has their defined instrument and role.

So rather than every song being its own sonic world like Discovery, Human After All has a very distinct homogenized industrial sound, where the same gritty distorted instruments appear across nearly every song.

Even the album's only sample-based track, Robot Rock, slots perfectly into Human After All's distorted universe.

In fact, it fits so seamlessly, I was shocked to discover that it's built from one of Daft Punk's most straightforward samples, with the core of the song lifted directly from 1980s release The Beast by Breakwater.

Here's a back-to-back comparison.

Now the thing about building an entire album around a singular sound is that it invites a polarizing response.

If you connect with that sound, you're likely to love the album.

But if you don't, it can be hard to connect with any of it.

And that's exactly where many listeners landed with Human After All.

Unlike Discovery, which was met with generally positive reviews despite some detractors, Human After All saw the inverse.

Many critics were lukewarm, some were openly harsh, and none were entirely positive.

The Guardian called it, quote, a joyless collection of average ideas stretched desperately thin, while MixMag went even further, writing that it sounded, quote, as if Bengal Tare took a holiday and let his four-year-old son loose in the studio with a toy sound machine, unquote.

The album's failure to connect with some audiences was compounded by the fact that Thomas and Guimond chose to not give any interviews after its release.

Years later, they would acknowledge that decision to be a mistake, but at the time, there was a clear rationale behind it.

In 2013, Thomas finally explained, quote, "...Human After All was a dark album, inspired by the oppressive world of George Orwell's 1984."

For example, the song Television Rules the Nation explicitly references the overwhelming presence of media in our daily lives.

It would have been obscene and inconsistent to give numerous media interviews to point out the omnipresence of the media."