It can be hard to tell, but one thing is for certain – Random Access Memories definitely sounds expensive.
Daft Punk's fourth proper album, Random Access Memories, has arrived with a level of hype typically reserved for superstar artists. The record is projected to sell between 250,000 and 300,000 copies in the United States in its first week, more than twice the number of copies the French dance duo sold of their third album, Human After All, since it came out in 2005. Their most popular album, Discovery, was released in 2001, and it was certified gold at a time when major artists were still routinely going multiplatinum. From an outside perspective, the incredible excitement around Random Access Memories is unlikely: a modestly successful niche act returning after years of silence to the best sales of their career. But their success isn't so shocking when you consider that in the time since their last album, Daft Punk began a slow, steady, and methodical branding campaign that has made them household names.
Daft Punk have always been geniuses of marketing. The French duo realized very early on in their career that even if they were making some of the most mind-blowing dance music of their time, they would require a strong visual if they were going to connect with a wide audience. Their first hit, "Da Funk," made it to MTV on the strength of a video by Spike Jonze featuring a man-sized dog walking through New York City with a boom box. The video for their second hit, "Around the World," was a collaboration with director Michel Gondry that featured robots and elaborate choreography. These were exciting videos, but at the time, a lot of faceless electronic artists were making visually stunning videos and getting late-night play on MTV. By the time the duo returned with their second album, MTV was phasing out video programming, and they needed to do something else. So they took a cue from Gondry's clip and bought some robot costumes. This is where the legend of Daft Punk truly begins.
Source: youtube.com
Daft Punk weren't the first popular act to replace a cult of personality with striking visual branding. Pink Floyd became one of the best-selling acts of all time with cover art by Storm Thorgerson that was as iconic as a corporate logo and far more memorable than the band's faces, and though relatively few people are familiar with The Grateful Dead's music, virtually everyone knows their dancing bear logo. Daft Punk took the general idea of '70s album rock visual aesthetic and pushed it a step further by becoming their own iconography — faceless, yet as exciting and visually memorable as the biggest pop stars. They went even further with this in 2007 when they went on their now legendary "pyramid tour" and gave their DJ set a visual spectacle on par with Pink Floyd's tour for The Wall. That tour completely changed the arc of their career — their most recent project at the time was the critical and commercial flop Human After All album — and was a crucial moment in terms of popularizing electronic dance music shows in the United States. This is when Daft Punk truly became stars, and a lot of it came down to fans closely associating the over-the-top euphoria of those shows with those stylish robot helmets.
