Daft Punk

Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo met in Paris as teenagers. They formed an indie-rock band called Darlin' with Laurent Brancowitz (who would later join Phoenix), but the project lasted only two gigs before dissolving. A Melody Maker review dismissed the music as "a daft punky thrash"—an insult the pair embraced as their new identity. As Daft Punk, they detonated French house onto the world stage with Homework (January 1997), a debut album spawning "Da Funk" and "Around the World," tracks that rewired what dance music could be on the radio.

But identity was their true innovation. In the mid-1990s, they appeared at promotional events masked with Halloween masks or hidden behind paper bags, and they refused to appear in their own music videos. Then they went one step further: full robot personas, debuted publicly with the Discovery era in 2001. The chrome-and-gold helmets were built by Paul Hahn of Daft Arts with French directors Alex and Martin, and they became the visual face of the band—though the band had no face. The origin story they fed the press was pure tongue-in-cheek mythology: their sampler exploded in a studio accident on September 9, 1999, and they woke up as robots. It was a joke committed to with deadpan conviction, built to protect their anonymity.

Discovery (2001) made them global pop stars, while Human After All (March 2005) divided critics but deepened their legend. The turning point came with the Alive tour (2006–07): performing a megamix of their catalog from inside a massive LED pyramid. Their celebrated Coachella 2006 set is widely credited with helping bring dance and electronic music to a mass North American audience, a legitimacy captured on the live album Alive 2007 (November 2007).

Throughout their heyday as Daft Punk, they kept their faces hidden. The mystery held for nearly three decades—a commitment to anonymity and spectacle that defined their era.