Cole Cuchna

Recall from our analysis of this track, Something in the Air points to the superheroes of the song title, presumably flying in the sky.

And in this narrative of man versus machine, who exactly are the superheroes?

Who is in the air?

Is it a bird?

A plane?

The robots?

No, it's us.

In Daft Punk's story, humans are the heroes.

And as such, the song Human After All joins superheroes for the set's final moments, paired with yet another visual surprise.

Turns out those LED panels on the pyramid aren't just limited to pure colors and abstract designs.

They can display full color images.

And Daft Punk saved this capability for this exact moment, filling the pyramid with a montage of human faces of all ages and races.

It's a perfect closing image, a true convergence of music and visuals, as the audience sees themselves inside the pyramid while hearing themselves celebrated as superheroes, human after all, bringing the set and the story to a euphoric, unifying end.

Now when Daft Punk debuted this show at Coachella, this was the true end of the set.

However, for the Alive 2007 tour, Daft Punk added an encore.

And after such a definitive, powerful ending, you might wonder where they could possibly go from here.

Well, like the ending of Electroma, they chose to remind us of an essential part of being human, our mortality.

Daft Punk return to the pyramid as the word human repeats, a callback to the show's start.

But rather than pair the word with robot, they eventually follow it with another word, die.

The phrase humans die is, on its surface, a pretty dark way to end the show.