With the release of the 10th anniversary edition of their hugely successful Random Access Memories album, Daft Punk have taken another dip into their archive and blown the dust off a demo of Infinity Repeating, one of the tracks that didn’t make the cut.
Featuring Strokes singer Julian Casablancas on vocals, along with his bandmates from The Voidz, Infinity Repeating is described by Kim Taylor Bennett, the interviewer in an official Daft Punk ‘Memory Tapes’ video that was posted over the weekend, as officially the band’s “last song ever”.
“Way to be dramatic!” jokes Casablancas, who did end up featuring on Random Access Memories as co-writer and vocalist on Instant Crush, the album’s fourth single.
Discussing Infinity Repeating, he goes on to explain: “Before Instant Crush we were doing this track, and I thought it was cool, and they were like ‘yeah, we’re not going to do anything with that’. And so I thought, ‘can I play, may I play?’”
Despite his interest in the song, Casablancas says that he originally suggested that someone else should sing it. “I sang the demo and I was like - and I wouldn’t generally have this grandiose ambition - but I just thought, because they work with all these huge-name people, maybe Stevie Wonder wants to sing this song. I thought that’d be cool. And they were just like ‘no, no, no - you do it!’”
With its shimmering Rhodes piano and warm production, the track certainly has a whiff of Wonder’s ‘70s material. We can imagine it slotting on to Songs In The Key Of Life as a sister song to As, perhaps.
That said, Casablancas’ delicate vocal on the demo sounds fine to us - check it out below.
Discussing the creation of Instant Crush, Casablancas says: “They played me two different songs. One was the verse of Instant Crush and one was the chorus of Instant Crush. And I think I was like, ‘can we just put them together?’ I don’t know if they were secretly setting me up and intended for me to say that or if they were like ‘what a brilliant idea you just had!’”
Casablancas also reveals that Daft Punk initially suggested that he sing Instant Crush in his “Strokesy” voice, but he told them that what he really wanted was to be a 'cyborg'.
“The vocoder sound and all those things, it was ironically more like ‘me’ [who wanted it],” Casablancas confirms. “So when we did the video I wanted to be more like Robocop or something.”
The 10th anniversary edition of Random Access Memories is available now and features 35 minutes of new music. Find out more on the Daft Punk website.
