One of Daft Punk’s collaborators during the Random Access Memories sessions has confirmed that the defunct French house duo are sitting on a bunch of unreleased studio material that would have served as the follow-up album to their 2013 opus.
Quinn, the mononymous drummer who performed on the majority of the tracks on RAM, spoke about his experience recording with Daft Punk in a recent video interview for the student-run media organization alt.news 26:46. “On RAM, I was pretty much the last person to come in on the record,” he said. “The next record [Daft Punk] were working on, I was the very first person.”
And so Quinn had the unique experience of getting to watch Daft Punk in some of their earliest songwriting and recording stages. “Thomas [Bangalter] had this keyboard, and actually had a computer program, and he was just experimenting,” he explained. “He was just hitting things. We were literally just trying to get vibes across. He was on the beautiful mixing board in there. I’m out in the studio, I started on my weird drum set… Whatever he would give me, I would answer and try to come up with something.”
Quinn added that fellow RAM collaborator Paul Jackson Jr. came into the studio to record some guitar parts for the new album, and that they also brought someone else in on wind instruments. “That unnamed record, I think will be a lot of spontaneous things,” he added. “I remember playing this one thing — my piano board, the insides of a piano — I put my kick pedal on the strings and played it like a kick drum. I remember those guys really loving that. I don’t know if it’ll make the record. It was the craziest, weird-sounding things.”
As for the status of the lost Daft Punk album, Quinn’s guess is as good as ours: “I keep checking in. I’m told they’re working on it. It’s coming out of the locker. I asked Daft Punk permission to talk about it for another article, ’cause they’re very secretive as you know. And the greatest guys.”
Watch the full interview below; the above quotes begin around the two-minute mark.
Last April, Bangalter released a solo orchestral album called Mythologies, and the following month, Daft Punk shared a 10-year anniversary reissue of RAM that included nine previously-unreleased tracks. However, the band members seem content having put an end to the Daft Punk era: “When we started I was 18 and when we ended Daft Punk I was 46,” Bangalter said in an August 2023 interview. “I am relieved and happy to look back on it and say ‘OK, we didn’t mess it up too much.’”
Editor’s note: Electronic musician Michaël Brun shared how Daft Punk’s Discovery changed his creative life in a recent episode of The Spark Parade.