( EW.com ) -- Let 's play one final bass-drop requiem in memory of EDM . If the genre has n't already been wub-wub-wub 'd to death , Daft Punk would like to smother it with its own spirit hoodie . True , the duo 's Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo helped spawn this new wave of harder , faster , stronger dance music â€ ” but lately , they 've been slagging off that scene for its lack of imagination and its overreliance on preset sounds . Of course , that only makes Random Access Memories , their first proper album in eight years , feel more like a revelation : It features no electronics except for a modular synthesizer and some vintage vocoders , and uses only one sample . ( A snippet from the Sherbs ' `` We Ride Tonight '' opens the final track , `` Contact . '' ) Recorded in the studio with an orchestra , a children 's choir , and an all-star cast that includes Pharrell Williams , Nile Rodgers , Julian Casablancas , Panda Bear , and Giorgio Moroder , it 's a headphones album in an age of radio singles ; a bravura live performance that stands out against pro forma knob-twiddling ; a jazzy disco attack on the basic house beat ; a full collaboration at a time when the superstar DJ stands alone . It 's also quite moving ; melancholy runs through every song . As the title suggests , RAM explores the way that memory is stored â€ ” on a hard drive or in your brain . Nostalgia is a major theme here , both in the music , which celebrates disco ( first single `` Get Lucky '' ) , funk ( `` Give Life Back to Music '' ) , and classic sci-fi soundtracks ( `` Contact '' ) , and in the lyrics , which often feature men of a certain age reckoning with the past . ''Giorgio by Moroder '' begins with the disco godfather recalling the days when he stayed out all night and slept in his car , while the music vividly evokes each decade he describes , building from a dramatic string section to record-scratching to a synth-pop finale that plays out like an epic laser-tag game . Later , Todd Edwards wants to `` feel like I 'm 17 '' on the pedal-steel daydreamer `` Fragment of Time , '' and the wistful `` Touch '' finds Paul Williams looking back on young love : `` I remember touch , '' he sighs through a vocoder , as spaceship sounds fire off . ''You 've given me too much to feel/ You 've almost convinced me I 'm real . '' You do n't know whether you 're supposed to imagine him playing a sad HAL 9000 or a lonely astronaut . And maybe that 's the point : It 's hard to tell the difference between people and machines in dance music these days . But if EDM is turning humans into robots , Daft Punk are working hard to make robot pop feel human again . Grade - A . BEST TRACKS : . ''Giorgio By Moroder '' A disco odyssey that explains the genre 's back story . ''Touch '' A robot lament . See the original story at EW.com . CLICK HERE to Try 2 RISK FREE issues of Entertainment Weekly . © 2011 Entertainment Weekly and Time Inc. All rights reserved .
sci-fi soundtracks is the duo 's `` synth proper album in wub-wub-wub 'd '' It was recorded with an orchestra , a children 's choir , and an all-star cast . Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter comprise the duo .