Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter Doffs the Helmet and Takes on a New Guise: Composer for Orchestra

“After more than two decades at the forefront of electronic dance music (while in a robot-style helmet), Thomas Bangalter is releasing ‘Mythologies,’ a score for traditional symphony orchestra,” writes Zachary Woolfe in Monday’s (4/3) New York Times. “The most shocking part of ‘Mythologies,’ a ballet that premiered last summer in Bordeaux, France, came after the dance was over…. The composer of the music came out and took a bow. What was surprising was that his face and his wild halo of dark curls were showing. After spending more than 20 years in public behind shiny, opaque robot-style helmets as half of the pathbreaking dance-music duo Daft Punk, Thomas Bangalter was ready to be seen without barriers…. ‘Mythologies,’ Bangalter’s first major solo project since Daft Punk announced its dissolution in February 2021, is arriving on Friday as an album on Erato, the distinguished French classical label. Conceived in 2019, long before Daft Punk’s breakup, it is a 90-minute instrumental score for traditional symphony orchestra, with nary an electronic sound in the mix…. For Bangalter the project also has a kind of post-apocalyptic, back-to-basics optimism: ‘After everything, the violin will remain.’ ”