Imagine you are Daft Punk, perhaps the only musical act in history whose cultural profile actually rose in the wake of their weakest and least-popular studio album, 2005′s Human After All. You wrote and directed your own experimental feature film, 2006′s Electroma; toured the world to great acclaim in 2006 and ’07; got sampled in a smash 2007 Kanye West single “Stronger;” and composed a soundtrack for 2010′s Tron: Legacy. But somehow all this has been dwarfed by years of speculation over what you’ll do next, as if the world had been seduced by your faceless robot image into believing that you are actual super heroes. Rising to the challenge, you then spend years on a magnum opus in which the implicit goal revealed by numerous pre-release interviews with collaborators both big and small is to fulfill the purpose of the album’s first song: Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo have aimed to do nothing less than to “Give Life Back to Music.”

Random Access Memories is a concept album in which these would-be androids take it upon themselves to restore humanity to the music scene they themselves helped make more mechanical. Recorded with veteran… read more »