Why Did Daft Punk Split Up?

Daft Punk officially ended their electronic music duo in 2021, but the reason why has stayed a mystery until recently. 

In 2021, legendary French EDM duo Daft Punk with Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo released a video titled “Epilogue” which means a final or concluding event to announce their split after a strong 28 years. The video was artistically done, but was also emotional. The two were walking at the same speed in the video for a few minutes, then de Homem-Christo started to slow down while Bangalter kept going at a constant speed, which seemed to represent de Homem-Christo’s declining exit from the duo. 

The duo has always presented themselves as robots. In the video, Bangalter then caught up to his partner, and de Homem-Christo turned around to have Bangalter hit the self-destruct switch on his robot. de Homem-Christo then had 60 seconds, walked away, and allowed his robot to explode in a dramatic goodbye, while Bangalter continued to walk into the sunset which represented how he would continue his separate music career (he has explored a completely new outlet with ballet music now) – but why did the two break up?

The two left it somewhat of a mystery for two years, but recently Bangalter opened up about it in a 2023 interview. Bangalter explained the project was always supposed to represent the blurred line between reality and fiction with their robot characters. But he said now with the advancement of technology, he felt their message was not the same. 

Bangalter said he loves technology as a tool but that he is somehow terrified of the nature of the relationship between the machines and ourselves along with how his concerns about the rise of artificial intelligence go beyond its use in music creation. He explained he felt some fans have begun to misunderstand Daft Punk’s intentions when it comes to digital culture.

The artists essentially felt their movement and message had successfully come to an end. Bangalter said Daft Punk was an exploration that started with machines and then started to drift away from them. He also compared Daft Punk to a performance art installation that lasted for 20 years. But Daft Punk’s tracks including “One More Time and “Get Lucky” will always keep a legendary status, “Get Lucky” recently reached 1 billion plays on Spotify in December 2023.

Daft Punk wanted to use their robot personalities to express something extremely moving that a machine cannot feel, but a human can. Adding that they were always on the side of humanity and not on the side of technology. However, it seems like technology may have been overriding this message, he said: “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.”