Daft Punk might no longer be active as a duo, but that hasn’t gotten in the way of some new releases in recent years. From alternate mixes of songs to a previously unreleased song called “Infinity Repeating,” there have been plenty of scraps for Daft Punk aficionados to enjoy. Now, Fortnite and publisher Epic Games have brought a new music video to the table
Today, Daft Punk and Fortnite released a music video for “Contact,” available on YouTube. The video uses imagery from the Fortnite Daft Punk Experience, offering a rhythmic light show flying through the reaches of outer space. Prior to this point, “Contact”, the final track from the 2013 album Random Access Memories, lacked an official music video.
The “Contact” music video opens with an image of Earth seen from space, accompanying audio from the Apollo 17 mission and a sample from the intro of “We Ride Tonight”, a 1982 track by Australian rock band The Sherbs. As the camera pans upward, the robots drift into view, setting the stage for a trippy interstellar voyage.
Incidentally, “Contact” is the only track on Random Access Memories to make use of samples.
Like Fortnite‘s Daft Punk Experience, the new “Contact” video features some references that long-time Daft Punk fans may appreciate. The Fortnite model of Stella, a character from the 2003 Daft Punk film Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem, appears to beckon the robots into their journey, and the run cycle from “Infinity Repeating” shows up near the end of the video.
Daft Punk Is Over, But It Never Truly Dies
If you have much history with Daft Punk, “Contact” can be one of the duo’s most emotional tracks. Closing out their final album, it accelerates the mostly analog soundscape of Random Access Memories into a singularity of distortion, serving as an abstractly appropriate coda to an incredible career.
The “Contact” music video follows in the wake of a recent performance by Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter, who opened a DJ set in Paris with the track. There’s still no reason to believe Daft Punk will ever reunite to produce new music, but both Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, the other half of the project, should still have interesting solo careers ahead of them.
While I’m not one to pay much attention to Fortnite‘s endless string of collaborations, the “Contact” music video can easily be enjoyed in its own right. It might struggle to compete with legendary Daft Punk music videos like Da Funk — or the entirety of Interstella 5555, which acts as an extended music video for Discovery — but it appropriately holds its own.
- Released
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September 26, 2017
- ESRB
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T for Teen – Diverse Content: Discretion Advised, In-Game Purchases, Users Interact
- Engine
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Unreal Engine 5