Daft Punk announces split

Daft Punk, the enigmatic and influential French electronic music duo, on Monday announced that they were splitting after 28 years of making music together.

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The Grammy-award winning pair, made up of Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter, announced the decision in an eight-minute video posted Monday on their website. The video, titled “Epilogue,” includes excerpts from their 2006 movie, “Electroma,” according to Billboard.

Daft Punk’s longtime publicist, Kathryn Frazier, confirmed the split to Variety, though she declined to provide further information on the decision.

Former indie-rock bandmates Bangalter and Homem-Christo formed Daft Punk in 1993 in Paris, years after they initially met at school. After releasing their debut album “Homework” in 1997, they found international success with their singles “Around the World” and “Da Funk,” which also earned the group its first Grammy Award nomination. The group’s second album, “Discovery,” was released in 2001 and included the singles “One More Time” and “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.”

In 2005, Daft Punk released “Human After All,” which garnered a 2006 Grammy Award nomination for Best Electronic/Dance Album. The group’s final studio album release, 2013′s “Random Access Memories,” included collaborations with artists including The Strokes’ Julian Casablancas, Animal Collective’s Panda Bear and singer Pharrell Williams. The album reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and marked a shift away from the sample-based dance music that the group had helped to popularize, according to The New York Times.

“In some ways it’s like we’re running on a highway going the opposite direction to everybody else,” Bangalter told the newspaper after the album’s release. “Computers were never designed in the first place to become musical instruments.”

Over the course of their nearly three decades of collaboration, Daft Punk won six Grammy Awards and earned 12 nominations. They were well-known for donning their iconic robot helmets, which were created in 1999 after an accident in the studio caused them to lose all work on a track they were working on, according to Vice. The helmets gave the duo a veil of pseudo-anonymity.

“(The helmets) mean what people will think they mean,” Bangalter said in a 2000 interview published on Vice. “I think that music and any form of art means that the people who are receiving things are putting the meaning to it much more than the meaning the people who create it can put into it.”

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