With the runaway success of their fourth studio album, Random Access Memories, WSJ. Magazine's Entertainment Innovator of the Year has made 2013 a knockout

ON SOME DAYS this summer, the robots would rise, get into their cars and pull onto Sunset Boulevard or Melrose Avenue—streets that, with their sun-sloshed vistas and waving palms, seem engineered for windows-down, volume-up music listening. Yet no matter what radio station they turned to, the robots were greeted by the same song, one they recognized right away. There was the supple, shoulder-lifting guitar lick; that sturdy, urging drumbeat; and the aerial chorus that functions as a brag, a mission statement or both: We're up all night to get lucky. And though Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo —the two French musicians better known as the robo-attired duo Daft Punk —usually make a point of never listening to their past creations, they'd always let the music play. Despite having lived with the song for more than a year, even they weren't sick of "Get Lucky."

"It's an unexpected, simple, very cool surprise," says de Homem-Christo. "Seeing the next car is listening to it, and people are nodding. Or the other day, at a restaurant, seeing kids and mothers having a birthday party, and they're all dancing. I know it can be annoying, having it everywhere like that, but it seems to have spread."

It's a midsummer afternoon, and Bangalter and de Homem-Christo are sitting in a control room at Conway Recording Studios in Los Angeles, the city that serves as their stateside headquarters. The space is dominated by a gargantuan console teeming with hundreds of buttons and knobs. It looks like the kind of device that, were you to flip the wrong switch, would accidentally launch a drone strike on Palm Springs.

A little over a year ago, the two men were working out of this room, overseeing the final mixes of not only "Get Lucky"—a song so huge, it would sire endless remixes and remakes—but also much of Random Access Memories, their fourth studio album. Bangalter and de Homem-Christo describe their creative process as "research and development," and for Random, they worked without deadlines or budgetary constraints, with the hope of capturing the scope and sound of mammoth studio-crafted records from the '70s and early '80s—a time when cost was not a key consideration, and when a hit album had the same reach and life span of a hit movie.

As they were finishing up, Bangalter says, "We had a very strong sense of happiness. It was like a weird fantasy: Let's make a record like it's the '70s. But we were very puzzled by the way it would clash with today's world."

This is understandable, given that, on paper at least, the album would seem like a potential disaster—a record that found the duo turning away from the type of sound that's made Daft Punk one of the most memorable and unpredictable acts of the last 20 years. Ever since their 1997 debut, Homework, Daft Punk's been at the vanguard of electronic music, creating one sample-jacking, endorphin-morphing hit after another. And the group's ultrarare, mega-elaborate live shows helped set the standard for today's lucrative, spectacle-driven electronic-dance music festivals.

On Random, though, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo moved toward live instrumentation and a big studio sound. And, after years of working largely on their own, they brought in a raft of collaborators that ranged from strikingly of-the-moment ( Pharrell Williams ) to blatantly anachronistic ( Paul Williams, the former Muppets collaborator and writer of such Nixon-era classics as the Carpenters' "We've Only Just Begun").

The resulting album features not only the lushly produced disco of "Get Lucky," but also a career-recapping spoken-word history lesson from 73-year-old Italian producer Giorgio Moroder ; an eight-minute power-ballad featuring Paul Williams, a choir and a 65-person orchestra; and a handful of downer synth ballads that sound like they're being performed by a GPS device that's gone off its Wellbutrin. Sonically and culturally, Random resembles nothing else produced in 2013.

Yet it's turned out to be the biggest album of the group's 20-year career, aided by a past-forward marketing campaign and, of course, the inescapable "Get Lucky." At a time when audiences for everything in the mass-culture continuum—from summer blockbusters to top 10 TV shows—have fractured and dwindled, "Get Lucky" proves that, every once in a while, a song can transcend being merely an affable sing-along hit and become an omnipotent force across all ages and genders. It's like "Hey Ya!" or "Crazy in Love"—a song we'll pretty much be hearing until we die.

This was, in some ways, Daft Punk's hope all along. Ever since the early '90s, when they were teens in Paris, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo have rarely settled on living in one era at a time, instead interrogating the past, the present and the future all at once. "When we first met," says Bangalter, "we were already listening to music that was 20, 30 years older, or watching movies that were 50 or 60 years older. I think that's what we tried to do with Random. The only objective was to create something that could have a certain kind of timelessness."

BECAUSE THEY'VE TAKEN great pains to obscure their identities over the last two decades—with goofy masks or elaborately opaque robot helmets—a somewhat tenuous mystique surrounds the duo. Earlier this year, a photo of the two men, taken during what appeared to have been a booze-pong party at Columbia Records headquarters, found its way onto Gawker and the Huffington Post. The incident appears to have only mildly irked Daft Punk, but not for the reasons you'd expect. "We didn't play beer pong," Bangalter says, laughing. "I don't even know what beer pong is."

As anyone who saw that photo knows, the members of Daft Punk pretty much look like dudes who would listen to Daft Punk. Bangalter, 38, is tall and lean, with a light beard and an easy smile; on the day we meet, he's dressed in a gray Hüsker Dü T-shirt, light gray jeans and slip-on sneakers, his hair hidden beneath a blue-and-red Patagonia hat. De Homem-Christo, 39, has shoulder-length hair and heavier scruff and is wearing white sneakers, tight black pants, a dark T-shirt that says "Bad Attitude" and a wishbone pendant around his neck. He has a reputation for barely talking in interviews, but after initially appearing to doze off on the sofa, he becomes nearly as talkative as his longtime friend and partner.

The two first met in 1987, as eighth-grade art kids at Paris's Lycée Carnot, where they were surrounded by aspiring bankers (both come from creative backgrounds: de Homem-Christo's parents ran an ad agency, while Bangalter's father was a successful songwriter). It didn't take long for them to find one another. "[The school] was a factory for making businessmen," says Bangalter. "Anybody who had a certain aspiration for something creative, whether it's movies or music or design, would stand out." They struck up a conversation about film—The Lost Boys being the first of many movies they'd watch and discuss together. Later, they'd produce their own fanzine, Banane Mécanique (Clockwork Banana), the first issue of which featured a mash-up of the poster for A Clockwork Orange and the cover of the album The Velvet Underground & Nico.

And though Bangalter and de Homem-Christo both obsessed over vintage acts such as the Doors and Jimi Hendrix —and would spend hours at the library, looking at microfiche of old rock magazines—it would take years for them to make music together. Their first song was a short loop of drum machine and bass, recorded at Bangalter's home. "We were ripping off this bass line, thinking we were doing something extraordinary," says de Homem-Christo now, smiling at the memory.

Later, they'd form a ramshackle guitar band, Darlin', before immersing themselves in the growing rave movement, regrouping as Daft Punk and releasing a series of singles, finally culminating in Homework, which was recorded in Bangalter's bedroom. It's a buoyant, grabby debut, anchored by the underwater thump of "Around the World" and the prowling, glitchy bass of "Da Funk." The album was a critical hit, even in the states, and established Daft Punk as madcap dance-floor alchemists.

It also earned them a reputation as reluctant semi-stars. When they'd play gigs, de Homem-Christo would hide behind equipment or turn his back, Miles Davis –style, to the audience. "I was too shy to be confronted by any kind of audience," he says. "Going to the blackboard at school was the worst torture." To promote Homework, they wore goofy animal masks, kept a safe distance from the press and didn't appear in videos, preferring surreal clips directed by the likes of Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry.

For 2001's Discovery, Daft Punk introduced a new look, in the form of impenetrably sleek robot getups. They also debuted a new sound: a mix of soft-rock haze, guitar-shredding rock and meticulously coordinated goofiness. The record yielded Daft Punk's then-longest-charting hit, "One More Time," a new millennium ode to unyielding good times that, considering how the rest of the decade turned out, now sounds equal parts ebullient and poignant.

Daft Punk's music would continue to mutate over the coming years and albums, from the aggro Human After All (2005) to the swelling, orchestra-aided Tron: Legacy soundtrack (2010). With each new release, the robot masks would undergo some new iteration. For Bangalter and de Homem-Christo, the masks function as a way to ensure privacy: They like being able to go out without being harassed, and they strive to keep their personal lives as undocumented as possible (neither cares to discuss his family, though both have children, and Bangalter is married to French actress Élodie Bouchez ).

In later years, as the duo got more famous—their legendary 2006–2007 tour found them playing gargantuan arenas—the helmets let them avoid all the insincere glad-handling that comes with being recognized, especially in the music industry. "You feel it's not real when people are, like, petting your back all the time," says de Homem-Christo. But, perhaps most importantly, being cloaked in head-to-toe suits—the most striking iteration of which was designed, with glittery sleekness, by Saint Laurent's Hedi Slimane —and voice-altering electronics grants the members of Daft Punk the ability to disappear from even themselves. "It allows you to forget what you've done and what you are," says Bangalter. "For us, the idea of always starting from scratch is really interesting."

It's an ethos that goes all the way back to their early days, right after they came up with "Da Funk." The track was such a crowd-pleaser that Bangalter and de Homem-Christo set out to make a soundalike sequel. It would have been an easy hit, but the song was such an obvious unsatisfying self-homage, they decided not to release it. "That was a big change of direction," de Homem-Christo says. "We said, 'Let's try something totally opposite,' and from that day, we never did the same thing."

BANGALTER, QUICK AND SPRINGY, is leading me around the room at Conway, where they worked not only on Random, but also on several tracks for Kanye West's Yeezusalbum. He shows me a gorgeous Steinway piano in one corner, and a booth where they oversaw the Gary Glitter–gone–tribal drumbeats of West's hit "Black Skinhead." In their early years, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo preferred to do much of their work at home studios, but Random opened them up to "stuff we couldn't really do at home," says Bangalter, gesturing around a large recording area. "We were like, Okay—clap—let's experiment."

Random began in earnest in 2008, when Bangalter and de Homem-Christo moved their gear into a giant studio and began playing around. Inspiration came from Tron, which they were still in the midst of scoring, and which required them to work with a full orchestra. Though they'd collaborated with other musicians in the past—most notably on the 2007 West single "Stronger"—as Tron progressed, they found themselves energized by the prospect of incubating a more open-ended creative community. They started to see their role on Random less as musicians and more as filmmakers, shepherding a large group of disparately talented people and uniting them behind a single vision.

So Bangalter and de Homem-Christo ditched their samplers and began a years-long series of recording sessions, traveling to Los Angeles, Paris and New York. As with any project they undertake, Bangalter says, making an album "is so day-to-day. We don't have a road map or a master plan."

Perhaps no track exemplifies their calculated capriciousness better than "Get Lucky," which took more than a year to record. Bangalter and de Homem-Christo had been working on the track since 2008, but the song's sparkling guitar lines weren't in place until they met with legendary guitarist and producer Nile Rodgers. At first, the three men just talked.

"Their discussions with me were holistic discussions," notes Rodgers, who provided "Get Lucky" with its spiky backbone riff. "It was like, we're treating this record as if the Internet doesn't exist. And I interpreted that as, we're approaching this record the way we approached records in the pre-digital era. Which meant performances had to have a linear life: a beginning, a middle and an end. And those performances had to be played pretty damn good."

After some discussions about what the group was trying to achieve, Rodgers took out his guitar and started playing. The riff for "Get Lucky," Rodgers says, came "right there on the spot. When I first started playing, it was a little too complicated. You could see this look on Guy-Man's face, which was not so approving but respectful, and I knew I wasn't in the right place yet. But that's how all my stuff starts out. I do complicated things first, simplify it, then work backwards." Rodgers would wind up contributing to three songs on the album, including the most recent single, "Lose Yourself to Dance."

Months later, after shaping the track on their own, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo summoned Pharrell to their studio in Paris. Once again, they didn't start playing right away. Instead, they listened to a few singles Pharrell had been working on and talked music.
"They were feeling the same way I was," Pharrell says. "That everything now is so programmed, it's missing the human element."

"They're very methodical, but at the same time very sensitive with how they make their music," Pharrell continues. "Not sensitive in a negative way, but very open. And their music is always in a constant pursuit of feeling. That's a recurring theme in every piece of music they make, and that's not a human trait to me; it's more characteristic of a robot."

After giving the jet-lagged Pharrell a superstrong over-the-counter French stimulant, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo cued up a rough draft of "Get Lucky" and asked if he was interested in working on it. "For the most part, they let me roam free," he says. "They introduced it as a blank canvas: What are you hearing; what are you seeing? We did so many takes of different parts, because they like to capture something perfect. And perfect doesn't mean that every syllable is sung correctly. Perfect means it touches the soul."
When it was all over, Pharrell got back on a plane. He was so exhausted, he could barely remember what he'd sung.

HERE ARE A FEW oft-spoken truisms about the music industry in the year 2013: Pop songs, even big ones, are lucky if they can dominate the airwaves for more than a few weeks; the major-label system is a slowly smoldering empire in decline; the best way to ensure a chart-topping, culture-conquering album is to shake the tendrils of some deep-pocketed mega-corp (Samsung, Bud Light) that has as much to with music as it does with, say, llama husbandry.

These are all, sadly enough, pretty much well-founded realities at this point. But the release of Random, and its ensuring success, has proved to be, at the very least, a temporary rebuke to the way music has been sold in the last decade.

Bangalter and de Homem-Christo had funded the record's production, but instead of releasing it independently, they turned to Columbia Records, one of the oldest major labels in the world—and also one of the last. "Before we'd heard the record, we met with them to talk about their philosophy," says Columbia Chairman Rob Stringer.
"Their attitude was, records do still sell, if they have quality and imagination behind them. We talked about campaigns that were really based on the golden age of the record industry, in the '70s and '80s, when the Sunset Strip was as much about music as it was about movies."

Random was introduced using a mix of retro showmanship and new-media cunning. Instead of announcing the record online, the band teased it with a brief, vague ad onSaturday Night Live, a clip that featured little more than their helmeted visage and a quick snippet of "Get Lucky." That was followed by billboards in cities like New York and London; a series of YouTube interviews with the likes of Pharrell and Rodgers; and a reveal of the album's track-listing on the video-sharing app Vine.

The buildup to the record was so steadily intriguing that, as Random's release date came closer, its success felt like a fait accompli—which is strange, given that, for all their success, Daft Punk had never broken into the top 40 in the U.S. So when the album finally debuted at number 1, no one was surprised—in part because of its persuasive marketing, but also because, by that point, "Get Lucky" was beginning to lodge itself in the country's collective hippocampus.

And though it never actually reached the top of the singles charts in America—denied entry by Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines," also featuring Pharrell—it's hard to think of another song this year that proved as joyfully egalitarian, or as reliably escapist, as "Get Lucky." "People are in a time or a place when they wanna feel again," says Pharrell, when asked why the song took off. "The Internet has brought on so much ubiquity. When you can get the news real-time, and with 7 billion people on the planet, odds are, there's gonna be bad news. I think we're all ready to hear music that takes us away and allows us to have a good time again. Most people just want to be happy."

There's another music-biz axiom that Daft Punk's flouted this year, much to the chagrin of its fans: Namely, that when you've got an album as big as this one, you've got to get out and play it live.

The group's last tour—during which they performed in a massive light-up pyramid—ended in 2007. The shows have become legendary: Like Woodstock, they're the kind of gigs people remember fondly, even if they weren't actually there. Daft Punk never had a problem selling out huge venues, but the group's scarcity has only increased their fans' demand for more stage time.

As proof, witness the group's only live appearance this year, at the MTV Video Music Awards. They were originally supposed to appear on Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, but after what host Stephen Colbert later claimed was interference from MTV, the duo pulled out. (MTV, Colbert and Daft Punk all declined to comment.) As it turns out, the VMAs wound up being Daft Punk's only strategic misfire of the year—after all the buildup to their appearance, it was deflating to watch two guys in robot suits simply help hand out an envelope onstage.

As of now, the group has no plans to play live, even though the electronic-dance field they've inspired has grown into a multimillion-dollar industry, and despite the fact that there are no doubt millions of fans (and certainly a few business associates) who would love to see them hit the road.

"We're not sensitive to any kind of pressure, because the most valuable thing we have is our own freedom and creative dreams," says Bangalter. "There's less value for us in a big bag of money than in a creative idea we want to fulfill. The world we live in today is slightly off because money makes the world go. So we've had the freedom to always pick the thing that makes us the most happy."

Still, it seems a given that at some point Bangalter and de Homem-Christo will decide to reimagine their live show, in the same way they rewired their sound. After all, a song like "Get Lucky" only comes along once or twice a career, and as much as the robots love watching our reactions to it from the safety of their cars, it's hard to believe they won't want to see that joy amplified, illuminated and shared, and among thousands of faces all at once. After all, they're only human.

Corrections & Amplifications
Model Gisele Bündchen, on the cover of the November issue of WSJ. Magazine, is wearing a Harry Winston sapphire micropave ring, price upon request, harrywinston.com. The credit was omitted from the table of contents.