After 28 years, one of the era’s biggest dance acts are hanging up their helmets
French electronic music legends and style trailblazers Daft Punk, real names Thomas Bangalter, 46, and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, 47, have split. The duo announced their retirement through an eight-minute clip titled Epilogue, which used footage from their cult 2006 film, Electroma.
Specifically, the footage featured the duo bidding each other farewell as they walked across a cracked desert before one of them self-destructed. After the explosion, a cutaway reads "1993-2021" with two robot hands making a circle around a sunset.
Daft Punk’s longtime publicist Kathryn Frazier confirmed the news, but she gave no reason for the split.
From Da Funk in 1995 to Get Lucky in 2013, Daft Punk was the torchbearers for French house music across the globe, winning six Grammy awards and pioneering the monumental sound-and-light shows that came to characterise the electronic dance movement (EDM) of recent years—and the famously publicity-shy music maestros did so while almost never revealing their faces.