Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter reveals worries over AI contributed to French dance droids splitting up

One of pop's greatest recent mysteries - the sudden and very surprising split of Daft Punk two years - has now been solved. Kind of.

In a new interview with the BBC, Thomas Bangalter, one half of the incredibly influential French dance duo with Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, has given some of the clearest answers as the why the droids parted ways.

And it turns out it was in part thanks to the rise of technology in the modern age, specifically artificial intelligence (AI) and the worry surrounding "the rise of artificial intelligence [and this goes beyond] its use in music creation."

Speaking to the BBC, Bangalter said: "[As Daft Punk] we we tried to use these machines to express something extremely moving that a machine cannot feel, but a human can. We were always on the side of humanity and not on the side of technology.

MORE: Daft Punk's Official Charts history in full

"As much as I love this character, the last thing I would want to be, in the world we live in, in 2023, is a robot.”

Bangalter also admitted that while it's now been almost two years since Daft Punk have split, neither he nor Guy-Manuel have spoken about their work together in the media to try and maintain the mystique that always surrounded Daft Punk, even when they were active (the duo would always famously wear android helmets to protect their identities whenever they were in public).

"Daft Punk was a project that blurred the line between reality and fiction with these robot characters,” he elaborated. "It was a very important point for me and Guy-Manuel to not spoil the narrative while it was happening."

Daft Punk originally announced their immediate split - which shocked the music industry and fans - in a statement in 2021. They had not released a studio album since 2013's comeback record Random Access Memories - which hit Number 1 in the UK - but had carved out a niche in production, helping create career best dance-leaning tracks for Kanye West (Black Skinhead, New Slaves) and The Weeknd (Starboy, I Feel It Coming). 

As a duo, Daft Punk scored a total of six UK Top 10 singles and surprisingly only hit the top of the Official Singles Chart once, with 2013's Get Lucky with Pharrell Williams. 

Their output in the late 90s and 00s, including the singles Around The World and One More Time, are widely regarded as being some of the most influential dance cuts of the 21st century, helping to usher in a wide dominance of EDM int the dance music space. Check out Daft Punk's Top 10 biggest singles in the UK here.

Since the split, Bangalter has been carving out a solo career (his new album Mythologies arrives April 7), while Guy-Manuel received a solo production credit on tracks for the The Weeknd's morose 2018 EP, My Dear Melancholy.

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