Random Access Memories (10th Anniversary 3LP)

Released May 17, 2013 via Columbia, Random Access Memories is Daft Punk's fourth and final studio album, a retreat from the laptop into the most expensive rooms in America. Sessions ran from 2008 to 2012 at Henson, Conway and Capitol in Los Angeles, Electric Lady in New York and Gang in Paris, with Omar Hakim and J.R. Robinson on drums, Nathan East on bass and Paul Jackson Jr. on guitar playing the grooves live. The robots had spent fifteen years sampling records exactly like this one, and here they hired the players instead.

Nile Rodgers' guitar locks "Get Lucky" and "Lose Yourself to Dance" into the pocket, Pharrell sings both, and "Get Lucky" went to No. 1 in more than thirty countries. "Giorgio by Moroder" turns the inventor of the disco synth into a narrator, three hours of interviews recorded on several microphones and cut down to his life story before the click track kicks in. Paul Williams wrote and sang "Touch," more than 250 elements stacked into the album's strangest, most moving seven minutes. Julian Casablancas sings through a vocoder on "Instant Crush," Panda Bear brings the one fully electronic song, "Doin' It Right," and "Contact" closes on a recording from Apollo 17, the last mission to the moon. Pitchfork's Mark Richardson heard it as "almost too perfect," which is the point and the risk of the whole project.

It debuted at No. 1 in the US, UK, France and Canada, selling 339,000 copies in its first American week. At the 2014 Grammys it won Album of the Year, Best Dance/Electronica Album and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical, and "Get Lucky" took Record of the Year and Best Pop Duo/Group Performance. The tenth-anniversary edition opens the vault on nine outtakes and demos: "Horizon," once a Japan-only bonus, the 2013 demo "Infinity Repeating" with Casablancas, vocoder tests that strip the robots down to the human voices underneath, Thomas Bangalter and Todd Edwards talking through the writing of "Fragments of Time," and a 2021 epilogue of "Touch" with a children's choir in place of Williams, first heard in the video that announced the duo's split.

10th Anniversary Edition, May 2023: three black LPs with a 16-page booklet and a "Lose Yourself to Dance" poster.