Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter releases new album, ‘Mythologies’: Listen

Thomas Bangalter's 'Mythologies', his first album since the end of Daft Punk, is out now. Listen to it below.

It's the long-awaited wide release of Bangalter's orchestral ballet score for the Angelin Preljocaj piece of the same name, which has been in the works since 2021. After 'Mythologies''s Bordeaux premiere in July 2022, the composition evolved into a 90-minute, 23-piece album performed by the same Romain Dumas-led Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine of the original live performances. 

Pieces titled 'L’Accouchement' and 'Le Minotaure' were shared ahead of the album's release via Warner Music last week, 7th April. The previously guarded French artist has also been giving personal interviews in the lead-up to 'Mythologies''s album debut, a pivot from the always-helmeted Daft Punk promotion.

In a new interview with Classical Connections Radio on Apple Music, Bangalter spoke about taking on the ballet score commission and his process writing for an orchestra for the first time. ('Mythologies''s music does not feature any electronic production hardware.)

"I went back to two worlds. My mother was a ballet dancer so my childhood was surrounded with a dancing class, choreographers and dancers. So this was definitely somehow known territory, even though I ended up doing dance music of a different kind," he told host Alexis Ffrench. "But it was a very intimate and personal project for sure, to go back in this process. Also I think I'm looking at scoring and writing for the orchestra in a very cinematic way too, because I just love movies and I think my relationship, even to classical proposals, is very well-connected to its use in films."

"...My process is very instinctive," he said. "At the same time this project was my first adventure in orchestration myself. I was just experimenting and trying different textures and working with some classical forms and also some less traditional forms as well."

In another interview with BBC, Bangalter opened up about the end of Daft Punk and the intention of their famous robot characters. "We tried to use these machines to express something extremely moving that a machine cannot feel, but a human can," Bangalter told Mark Savage. "We were always on the side of humanity and not on the side of technology.... 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." Read more from the interview here. 

'Mythologies' is Bangalter's first full-length solo project since Daft Punk split up in February 2021. His only other solo album is also a score, for the 2002 Gaspar Noé film 'Irréversible'. As Daft Punk, Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo scored the 2010 'Tron: Legacy' film, which later got a special remix edition. 

Listen to 'Mythologies'.