That leaves us with a handful of straightforward electronic tracks. It won't necessarily have been better, but there's none of the head-turning WTF? factor that's accompanied past Daft Punk tracks in the past. Anyone with an inclination towards the kind of 12‑in singles that get bracketed as cosmic disco or new Balearic will undoubtedly have heard stuff that sounds like this. These have some lovely moments – Rinzler's dramatic explosions of In the Air Tonight drums, the beautiful ebb and flow of Solar Saile – but there's something faintly underwhelming about them, perhaps because the inspiration of 80s-era Maurice Jarre and Vangelis hangs heavy over them, and dance music has explored both those influences pretty thoroughly in recent years. Then there are the tracks that attempt to meld electronics – usually a lonely throbbing synth line – with sawing strings and brass sections. There are the straightforward orchestral tracks, which sound suitably grandiose and cinematic, but with the best will in the world, could be the work of anybody. The results fall more or less into three categories. The faked tracks just sounded like Daft Punk, which apparently was never on the cards for the actual album: "We knew from the start that we were never going to do this film score with two synthesisers and a drum machine," explained Bangalter of their decision to co-opt an orchestra. What effect might the duo have on the world of the film soundtrack? But, for better or worse, it turned out to presage virtually every subsequent development in pop for the next decade, from the prevalence of Auto-Tuned vocals to the fetishisation of the 80s to the rise of the Guilty Pleasures phenomenon: it may well be the single most influential album of the last 10 years. On its arrival, Discovery appeared to be a cheese so ripe it threatened to stink your house out. The filtered house of their debut album Homework spawned imitations from everyone up to and including Madonna. Second, Daft Punk's ability to shift the course of pop music has been proven beyond measure. It occasionally seems less like a film that actually got made than a dream Thomas Bangalter might once have had. For one thing, Daft Punk might have been put on Earth specifically in order to record a soundtrack for a sequel to Tron: their 80s retro-futurist aesthetic is clearly indebted to the original, which variously features primitive electronic graphics, the soft rock of Journey, a plot in which a programmer becomes part of a neon-glowing computer mainframe after being shot with a laser, and the Scarecrow from Scarecrow and Mrs King.
You can see where the expectation comes from, though. There's being excited about a forthcoming record, then there's being so excited that you start speculating wildly about what it might contain, then there's being so excited you come over all Mike Yarwood and start doing impersonations. This time, the Tron leaks turned up everywhere – just in time for Disney to announce they were not the work of Daft Punk at all, but a slightly nutty-sounding Daft Punk fan with a YouTube account.Īt least it told you something about the degree of anticipation for the soundtrack. Unfortunately, the devotees duly discovered that no, they weren't faked yes, Bangalter and De Homem-Chrosto were responsible and no, the tracks weren't a joke. In the enormously unlikely event that they were responsible, it was suggested, these tracks were clearly intended as a joke to put people off the scent of their forthcoming masterpiece. When tracks purporting to be from the follow-up to the multimillion-selling Discovery emerged online, a lot of devotees rushed to announce that they were very obviously faked, that two zeitgeist-defining musical geniuses such as Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo couldn't possibly be responsible for anything so shoddy and uninspired. You would think that Daft Punk fans might exercise caution when it comes to internet leaks after that unfortunate business with their last studio album, 2005's Human After All. L ast summer, Daft Punk's soundtrack to Tron: Legacy leaked on the internet.
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