Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter Announces Solo Orchestral Album Mythologies

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Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter Announces Solo Orchestral Album Mythologies

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For 28 years, the French producer Thomas Bangalter was one half of Daft Punk. Daft Punk, the team of Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, started out as an underground house project, and they became hugely popular and influential around the world. They topped charts. They won Grammys. They scored a Hollywood blockbuster. They sold millions of records and put on mind-bending stadium shows. Last year, Daft Punk announced their breakup — a shocking moment, since the duo hadn’t actually released any music in five years. But now that Daft Punk are no more, Thomas Bangalter has announced his first-ever solo LP. It’s called Mythologies, and it’s coming out this spring.

Mythologies is an orchestral work, and choreographer Angelin Preljocaj commissioned it for a ballet that premiered last year. No music from the album has been released yet, but the record captures Bangalter’s score for the ballet, and it lasts 90 minutes. A press release claims that this won’t be electronic music at all: “This score does not draw on the resources of electronic music but instead involves the large-scale traditional force of a symphony and, as such, it embraces the history of orchestral ballet music in a gesture that is both personal and collaborative.”

You can hear a couple of minutes of Bangalter’s work in a teaser for the ballet, and it definitely sounds like classical music, not like Daft Punk at all.

Over the years, Thomas Bangalter has taken part in Daft Punk side projects Stardust and Together, and he’s also released a number of solo albums, scored the transgressive 2002 French film Irréversible, and contributed music to movies like Riga (Take 1), Climax, and En Corps. Last year, Bangalter was reportedly in the studio with Lil Nas X, but we haven’t heard any music that might’ve come out of that. Along with the announcement of Mythologies, Bangalter has shared a drawing of himself without his once-omnipresent Daft Punk robot helmet.

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