Last year, about the time of Superb Owl XLVII, there was high anticipation – no, yearning – for a new Daft Punk record. Somehow, after just enough time to process the jarring, mechanical monotony of Human After All, we really missed the connection of their style. There was a teaser for Get Lucky at Coachella in April, and it was surreal to witness not only evidence of new material, but also Nile Rogers and Pharrell Williams grooving next to robots. The album Random Accesss Memories was released in May, and Get Lucky broke out immediately as a sly jingle for condoms.

Instead of imagining a teenage boy trembling for hours with unbearable anticipation and gut-wrenching blue balls, I like to think there is plausible deniability in the song, and that it’s a catchy nonsense song. Not that I like to live in denial, but I have never paired Daft Punk with human affectation. Instead, I have followed along as they progressively shed off traits of warmth and feeling, laying bare raw rhythm and artifice. Discovery as an album was like an automaton built from discarded circuit boards, Electroma was a chilling Twilight Zone scenario, and Human After All was like a Cylon invasion, eradicating all of mankind. After all of that I was ready to sign off for the singularity and migrate my mind to a new technologic appliance upon the next Daft Punk release.

So you can understand my dismay with Random Access Memories – a record made for humans. Classic disco funk, Giorgio Moroder and Nile Rogers. Do the robot suits make sense anymore if they’re going to get sentimental about their influences, have the best songs on the radio, and make awkward/ambiguous public appearances? For most of Get Lucky it doesn’t really sound like any Daft Punk I recognize, but toward the end the undeniable robot voice sets in, as if it were just a retro disco charlatan sampling some Daft Punk to be clever. Just like the question, “What makes us human,” consider, “What makes Daft Punk?”