“Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” is 25 years old this month. Daft Punk released it in October 2001 as the fourth single from their second album, Discovery, which came out on 12 March 2001 and was recorded at Thomas Bangalter’s home in Paris.
It reached No. 25 in the UK, entering the Official Chart on 17 November 2001, and No. 17 in France. The anniversary lands in the same week the comics magazine Métal Hurlant opened orders for a 272-page special issue about the duo.
A riff from “Cola Bottle Baby”
The bouncing keyboard line is a sample of “Cola Bottle Baby”, a 1979 track by the American funk keyboardist Edwin Birdsong. He is credited as a writer next to Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo.
In 2016 Birdsong said he had recorded the song “30 years ago, and here come some guys from France.” When he asked where they had found it, he said, they told him: “I was going through bins and it popped out.”
Birdsong died on 21 January 2019, aged 77, and Gang Starr also sampled his “Rapper Dapper Snapper” on “Skills”.
The vocal is a vocoded robot voice, and the song is in F sharp minor. Its video, directed by Kazuhisa Takenouchi of Toei Animation under the supervision of Leiji Matsumoto, shows four aliens being turned into humans by machines.
That clip became a scene in Interstella 5555, the 2003 anime film Daft Punk wrote with Cédric Hervet, which runs through the whole of Discovery without dialogue.
The second life of the song
Daft Punk recorded a live version at Bercy in Paris on 14 June 2007. Released on 15 October 2007, it won the Grammy for Best Dance Recording in 2009.
The live version’s video, directed by Olivier Gondry, was cut from footage that fans shot on 250 cameras at the duo’s show at KeySpan Park in Coney Island, Brooklyn.
Kanye West sampled the track on “Stronger”, from his 2007 album Graduation, and Daft Punk got a co-writing credit. “Stronger” went to No. 1 in the US and the UK, and West performed it with Daft Punk, in their pyramid, at the 2008 Grammys.
The song is also the soundtrack to “Daft Hands”, a 2007 YouTube clip of Austin Hall revealing the lyrics word by word, written on his hands. Time put it on its 2010 list of YouTube’s 50 best videos.
In 2021, the year the duo split after 28 years, Billboard ranked the original No. 2 on its list of the 20 greatest Daft Punk songs.
A comic built on their world
The Métal Hurlant special, announced on 9 October, has work by more than 30 comics creators, including Laura Pérez, Malachi Ward, Jonathan Djob Nkondo and Zep, according to downthetubes.
It also reprints two archive stories by Mœbius and Philippe Druillet, who founded the magazine in Paris in 1975 with Jean-Pierre Dionnet. “My concept of Blade Runner linked up to a comic script I’d seen Mœbius do a long time ago,” Ridley Scott has said. It was called “The Long Tomorrow”.
The pre-order cover is by Cédric Hervet, Daft Punk’s long-time creative director, and Warren Fu, the pair behind the artwork for Random Access Memories. Eighty fans can pay $249.99 each to have their faces drawn by Florian Breuil into a “Concert That Never Happened”, DJ Mag reported.
For more French electronic history, read about de Homem-Christo co-producing Kavinsky’s Nightcall and Jarre’s Oxygène turning 50. Daft Punk later recorded Giorgio Moroder telling his life story for Random Access Memories, decades after his Moog work on I Feel Love.
Bangalter has since called a reunion unlikely, saying while promoting his new album, Mirage, a ballet score for 16 dancers, that “there are other things to explore”.
The English edition costs from $22.99 at Humanoids and is due in mid-January 2027.
Lead photo: Sony Music Entertainment / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0