Daft Punk Gets Human With a New Album Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, left, and Thomas Bangalter of the French duo Daft Punk. LOS ANGELES - Thomas Bangalter, half of the influential French dance-music act Daft Punk, has a house high in the Hollywood Hills here. He and his musical partner, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, divide their time between Los Angeles and Paris, where their families live. But for all their jet-setting, there's little evidence of rock star flash to be seen (well, apart from the Porsche that Mr. de Homem-Christo has parked in the driveway). Built in the midcentury style called post and beam, the bungalow exudes a subtle retro feel, with white carpeting, a cross section of a tree trunk as a coffee table, and a gravel fireplace in the living room. The swimming pool, a small square of radiant Hockney blue, is visible through the glass walls. The house's décor mirrors the retro-modern aesthetic that runs through every stage of Daft Punk's 20-year career. From its first dance-floor smash, "Da Funk," in 1996 through the synthetic dazzle of the 2001 album "Discovery" to the 2010 score for the movie "Tron: Legacy," the duo's defining balancing act has been breaking new ground while simultaneously invoking earlier golden ages of club music, like disco and 1980s electro-pop. Daft Punk expanded the audience for dance music alongside late-"90s peers like the Chemical Brothers, influenced Madonna and Kanye West, and helped shape the visual side of live dance music performance. Its famous robot masks and spectacular pyramid-shaped stage set inspired the high-tech showmanship of younger electronic dance music stars like Skrillex. In the eight years since the duo's last studio album, "Human After All," dance music has become big business, while Daft Punk-like sounds have infiltrated Top 40 radio, popping up in songs by artists like Justin Bieber. But after years on the cutting edge, Daft Punk has reversed course with its new album, "Random Access Memories," out on Daft Life/Columbia this week. Spurning the digital audio software that empowers the electronic dance music generation, the album is an analog flashback to the era of live musicianship, involving a crack squad of session players, the disco legends Nile Rodgers and Giorgio Moroder, indie rockers like Julian Casablancas and the hip-hop star Pharrell Williams. Mr. Rodgers and Mr. Williams both appear on the album's first single, "Get Lucky," an uncanny replication of the sparkling disco-funk of Mr. Rodgers's band Chic. "In some ways it's like we're running on a highway going the opposite direction to everybody else," said Mr. Bangalter, 38, sitting on the floor while the taciturn Mr. de Homem-Christo, 39, slumped on a sofa. It's a problem that confronts many innovators: When the rest of the world catches up with you, where do you go next? In a paradox that informs the entire project, doing something new for Daft Punk involved embracing the methods and mind-set of the past. The result is an album that is impressive but backward-looking, drawing on influences like soft rock, progressive rock and New Wave. Aspiring to the sumptuous production and arrangements of late "70s rock and R&B albums, "Random Access Memories" is full of songs that allude to time, transience and yesterday's idea of the future. The title is a play on the idea of computer memory - RAM - versus human memory. In part, the promotional campaign for the album also looked back to an era before Twitter and free downloads. Daft Punk and its team orchestrated a suspense-building trail of hints about a new project with billboard ads and teaser minicommercials on TV. Deliberately frustrating fans who have become used to instant gratification, Daft Punk stoked anticipation and created an aura of mystery around "Random Access Memories." Yet in other respects Daft Punk have provided a richer informational context for the project. The digital promotion involved a series of well-made videos, each based around an interview with a collaborator. "Pulling back the curtain a little bit more and more, they're showing the human aspect of making a record," said Clark Warner, the executive creative director of the online music store Beatport, where "Get Lucky" has been the top-selling track for several weeks. The notion of restoring a human touch to dance music seems central to the new album, whose opening track is titled "Give Life Back to Music." But the band mates, who met at school in Paris in 1987, are adamant that nostalgia is not their primary motivation. Nor is there anything "judgmental," said Mr. Bangalter, about the antidigital stance that he and Mr. de Homem-Christo took with the making of the album. Still, he referred to technology like Pro Tools and Auto-Tune as having "created a musical landscape that is very uniform" and enthused about the flexibility of the flesh-and-blood musicians they recruited, like the drummer John Robinson, who played on Michael Jackson's "Off the Wall." "It's an infinity of nuance, in the shuffles and the grooves," Mr. Bangalter said, knocking over his drink in his excitement. These things are impossible to create with machines. Albums by megabands like Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles, with their no-expense-spared attention to detail, served as the model for the album's intricately layered production. "The late "70s and early "80s is the zenith of a certain craftsmanship in sound recording," Mr. Bangalter said. For Daft Punk there is a subtle but crucial distinction between perfection pursued through human effort and the perfection easily achieved through digital means.