Thomas Bangalter on Daft Punk’s Breakup “We Didn’t Mess It Up Too Much”

Questions are still swirling in the heads of fans two years after the breakup of legendary house duo Daft Punk, and while they’ve often hid behind their helmets and allowed their work to speak for themselves, it seems the group’s Thomas Bangalter has finally decided to provide an answer.

As reported by Consequence, Bangalter recently hopped on an episode of BBC’s The First Time with Matt Everett podcast to talk about the band and his future as a solo musician, offering an explanation for why he and longtime collaborator Guy-Manuel de Homem-Cristo decided to call it quits.

“There’s a connection between fiction and reality, and everything we did was the different chapters in the story, and a story by definition has a beginning, a middle and an end,” Bangalter said. “The question I ask myself more than ‘why we did end it?’ [is] ‘how long could it last for so long?”

Bangalter previously spoke to the BBC earlier this year to discuss his long career, citing the duo’s uncomfortability with their robotic image in a world where technology and AI is making the future of music and life itself a little shaky. Now, he offers a more concrete reason behind the split.

“We were very critical, me and Guy-Man, on the history of rock ‘n’ roll – of all these bands that eventually start to be disconnected and age, and we didn’t think that we could get away with it either,” Bangalter went on. When we started I was 18 and when we ended Daft Punk I was 46. It’s been a significant part of my life but I am relieved and happy to look back on it and say ‘OK, we didn’t mess it up too much…’ And I think it’s actually interesting to have this opportunity to start, have the middle and to end it.”

Since Daft Punk’s break up in February of 2021, Bangalter has released his first solo album in two decades Mythologies, originally written for ballet score. While there will likely be no new music put out under the Daft Punk name, the 10 year anniversary of their album Random Access Memories has netted fans nine previously unreleased tracks as a goodbye present.