Human After All Turns 20

“I think we are closer to our fans when we are being robots than we would be if we were just far-away stars,” Thomas Bangalter says. It’s 2006, and he and his Daft Punk bandmate Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo are walking around the Coachella grounds the day after their packed-out gig under the Sahara Tent. It was the French electronic duo's long-awaited first performance together since releasing their third studio album Human After All. Onstage in their pyramid, synthesizers aplenty, they’re superstars. In the daylight, walking among the crowds, nobody tries to approach them. They’re just like anyone else.

It’s weird sometimes being human. It must’ve been especially weird being Daft Punk following the success of their 2001 opus Discovery, the now-certified-Gold album that officially cemented the helmeted duo into the canon of aughts electronic music. Its lead single "One More Time" was electrifying, euphoric, and quite literally demanded celebration -- but Bangalter and de Homem-Christo were more like the wallflowers at the party. They prioritized anonymity the very moment their project began to pick up steam, and from Discovery to their official breakup in 2021, Daft Punk never performed or made promotional appearances without their C-3PO-like headgear. It was a brilliant way to navigate Coachella-sized stardom. Being in the public eye is dehumanizing as it is. Why not beat everyone else to the punch?

It took Daft Punk two years to make Discovery, an album of funky, technicolor disco-house inspired largely by its creators’ childhood nostalgia. Its laundry list of precisely incorporated samples must’ve been a pain in the ass to clear. On the other hand, Human After All, which turns 20 years old this Friday, used only one sample in the entire album. Bangalter and de Homem-Christo performed and produced it themselves using a pair of guitars and drum machines, a vocoder, and one eight-track -- in a way, it really was their most "human" album yet. It took them only six weeks to make.

It’s not surprising Human After All was made quickly. "We were definitely seduced at the time by the idea of doing the opposite of Discovery, Bangalter explained at the time, and that’s exactly what they did. Where Discovery embraced typical pop song structures, Human After All used repetitive loops in ample time, like an even less elaborate version of their 1997 Chicago house debut Homework. The one sample you hear across the entire album is the main melody of lead single "Robot Rock," lifted from Philly funk band Breakwater’s 1980 song "Release The Beast." Naturally, "Robot Rock" is nearly five minutes of the same piercing, descending guitar riff. Its title serves as its only lyrics -- a recurrence across the album. Call it a lazy approach, but Daft Punk were intentional and deliberate about every choice they made. Human After All mimicked doomscrolling and brain rot before we had the jargon to describe the phenomena. It's darkly hypnotizing and bizarrely enticing, and never quite resolves. Sometimes, that never-ending search for a resolution is the most addictive feeling.

Human After All begins with its title track, a deceptively cheerful-sounding song bolstered by back-and-forth, staccato guitar notes. “We are human after all/ Much in common after all,” the robots sing, before repeating the word “human” a grand total of 105 times. The more it’s said, the more the anxiety seems to creep in -- “human” feels less like a unanimous species and more like a nebulous concept, a performance to perfect. By the time “Human After All” comes to its sudden halt, the show has begun and you’re the star. Don’t forget to hit your marks.

Considering Daft Punk synced Discovery front-to-back with an accompanying anime film, it’s safe to assume that they sequenced the records that followed with narrative in mind. And so after “Human After All” comes “The Prime Time Of Your Life,” which pairs a gnarled, percussive low-end melody with processed vocals that sound like a barbershop quartet from near-future dystopian hell. Its genuinely disturbing music video begins with a tween girl watching TV, and as she flips channels through news broadcasts, infomercials, and soap operas, every person on the screen has been replaced with a skeleton. The girl goes to her bathroom, pulls out a razorblade, and begins removing her skin with the ease of a banana peel. After her parents find her on the floor, the screen switches to a pair of skeletons swinging a jump rope. The formerly human girl appears, waves her skinless hand, and hops in. I was 13 years old the first time I watched the “Prime Time Of Your Life” video, and to this day, I can’t even think about it without a shiver going down my own skeleton. (It was directed by special effects makeup artist Tony Gardner, who after Spike Jonze is the second guy to have both a Daft Punk music video and a Jackass movie on his resume.)

The dizzying outro of “The Prime Time Of Your Life” then goes into those amped-up funk riffs of “Robot Rock,” as if Daft Punk are positing that it’s better to be an android than paranoid. From there, Human After All explores crunchy, biting industrial rock with “Steam Machine” and “The Brainwasher”; mellow neo-soul on “Make Love”; and arena-sized anthems with “Television Rules The Nation,” which like “Human After All” rehashes its relatively innocuous title until it becomes a foreboding sign of the times -- you saw what happened to that skeleton girl earlier, didn’t you?

Human After All’s penultimate track is its best and most memorable. “Technologic” was also the record’s second single, a fitting successor to “Robot Rock”: Like that lead single, “Technologic” is a guitar-heavy banger. Oddly enough, though, “Technologic” might also be the wordiest song Daft Punk ever made: “Buy it, use it, break it, fix it, trash it, change it, mail, upgrade it/ Charge it, point it, zoom it, press it, snap it, work it, quick, erase it,” goes a pitched-up monotonous voice, along with about four dozen additional commands. (My party trick in eighth grade was reciting all of them from memory.) Its self-directed music video, too, is mildly perturbing, but with a tongue-in-cheek slant; a Chucky-like robot doll with villainous eyes repeats the lyrics as they flash on a background screen. De Homem-Christo and Bangalter are on either side of him playing guitar. On an album full of aggression, existentialism, and technophobia, “Technologic” stayed faithful to the record’s theme -- the harmful incessant presence of media in everyday life -- while reassuring fans that Daft Punk could still have Discovery levels of fun. (A long eight years later, their prog-pop return Random Access Memories would assuage any remaining skeptics' doubt.)

Even when Human After All didn’t perform as well commercially as its predecessor, “Technologic” resonated. Even before that other guy brought Daft Punk to hip-hop audiences with “Stronger,” Busta Rhymes spun its spoken “touch it, bring it, pay it, watch it” into sexual innuendo, as did Charli XCX on Brat bonus track “Guess” nearly two decades later. If Human After All aged poorly, it’s only because it's an album so fixated on technology from an era before iPhones had even come out.

Human After All got mixed reviews upon its release. A lot of the criticism was predictable: It’s too tedious, it’s too sad, it’s not the pop album fans wanted. When the album leaked online months before its scheduled release, some people thought it was staged to deter pirating, asserting that this couldn’t possibly be the same guys who made Discovery. Human After All was immediately misunderstood, and the fact that Daft Punk didn’t do any press during the album cycle didn't help their case, either. De Homem-Christo later said that refusing to do interviews about the album was the “biggest mistake” they’d ever made. But the response to Human After All material at that history-making 2006 Coachella performance and the legendary Alive 2007 tour that followed proved that the album wasn’t the misfire many took it for at first — like Bangalter and de Homem-Christo’s robot helmets, it bridged the gap between the world and their roles within it. Being human is weird. It’s exhausting. It’s hellish. But commiseration, and a good guitar riff while you're at it, can make consciousness a bit more bearable.