It can be hard to think of the duo behind Daft Punk as people.
That’s not some comment on the way we treat superstars and celebrities. The distance between the robots and humanity is largely by their own design. The duo has covered their faces with elaborate LED-filled helmets and filled their music videos with alien cartoon characters. They famously hid their looks from their fans for years. But Thomas Bangalter and and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo are meatbags like the rest of us (Human After All, if you wanna go there). And they age just like the rest of us, barring The Rolling Stones.
So, that makes the rumors circulating that Daft Punk might tour and release a live album in 2017 all the more important. Given that the group tends to hit the road every 10 years, didn’t tour behind their biggest hit ever and will be in their early-to-mid 40s in 2017, this rumored Alive 2017 tour might be the last chance we get to see them on stages around the globe.
News of a tour and live album started swirling after Reddit discovered the website alive2017.com. At first glance, it’s a bare-bones website with the word “ALIVE” written on a black background. But a closer look at the letter “I” reveals a countdown clock that’s ticking down to Oct. 27. As they always do when these placeholder websites get passed around, internet sleuths dug into the source code and found this:
Genius points out that the numbers in the right-hand column are coordinates to Paris, Los Angeles, London, New York, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Ibiza, and Indio, California — the home of Coachella. Following that, the code details repeated attempts to send out a transmission, sending out the equatorial celestial coordinates for the Andromeda Galaxy and the word “Alive.” The code ends with the phrase “Wake Date 2016-10-27,” which matches the date that the countdown would terminate, and “Shep logged out,” which is a reference to a character in Daft Punk’s movie Instastella 5555.
If this were almost any other electronic act, this might be a bunch of fuss over nothing. But Daft Punk are one of the greatest touring acts to ever exist. The reason they don’t tour as extensively as other acts is that they create stages that are dropped out of other worlds with thousands of moving parts and perfectly timed effects. They care about their stage show more than anyone this side of Kanye. And since they’ll be in their 50s by the time a potential Alive 2027 rolls around — well past the point where they could be forgiven for calling it a day — this could very well be our last chance to catch them in person.
