Daft Punk Surprise Streams Unreleased 1997 LA Concert

Famed French electronic dance music duo Daft Punk broke up last year, a digital heartbreak in the midst of our ongoing extra hard few years. But the band fluttered back to life Tuesday — at least on social media, with a surprise livestream of a 1997 Los Angeles show at the Mayan Theater dropping on Twitch at 2:22 Pacific on 2/22/2022 (which is also 22:22 Greenwich Mean Time).

What does it all mean? Fan speculation went into overdrive on the morning of what happens to be the one-year anniversary of the band's break-up announcement. They created a new Twitter account earlier in the day and created and refreshed their presence on other social, video, and music sites.

Alas, we’re not holding onto too much hope that this is more than a one-off event. Rolling Stone reports that it’s a one-time-only livestream of this 1997 show. While you can’t take the show with you, you can pick up a new deluxe edition of their 1997 debut studio album, Homework, which is available for preorders now. The original album rocketed them to fame and features dance classics like “Around The World” and “Da Funk.” The new edition features 15 remixes that weren't available. They're also reissuing both Homework and the live album Alive '97 on vinyl.

The group also posted a new Daft Punk Essentials playlist for your listening pleasure on Apple Music, Spotify, and elsewhere.

Official site DaftPunk.com currently has a banner reading “Daftendirektour 97,” the name of their first tour, which took place 25 years ago. Perhaps the opportunity of this numerical convergence was just too powerful to pass up for a band whose members took on robot personas and played with duality in different ways throughout their career. As part of the retro vibes they’re throwing down, the button on their site to subscribe for email updates reads “Remember.” That word played a big part in their 2013 song “Touch”, and memory was a theme they explored with the album Random Access Memories).

The 1997 show at the Mayan was the second-to-last stop of the tour and their third stop in L.A. that year, after doing September shows at both the El Rey and an L.A. American Legion Hall.

So is Daft Punk back? Not that we know of. Their social accounts still feature birth and death years of 1993–2021. So the robot DJs haven’t been rebuilt just yet. But with previous live albums in both 1997 and 2007, maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll release one twice as far apart as before in 2027. Whatever happens, we’ll be watching for what they do next and keeping our wires crossed (wait, is that OK?) for more — and continuing to dance to whatever they share on their new Twitch account.