Artists who once innovated turned to re-creating past sounds by the 2010s

Evidence

As the 2010s continued, artists kept proving Simon Reynolds correct in their fixation on the past. In 2001, the French house group Daft Punk released their landmark album, Discovery, layering vocoders, arpeggiating analog synthesizers, and digitally degraded seventies samples into a unique and futuristic sound. But by 2013, the duo could only look backward. Their final album, Random Access Memories, meticulously re-created the lush, live-instrument disco of their childhoods. Pitchfork initially awarded the album an 8.8, only to later revise the score to 6.8, arguing that it failed to “push pop music forward.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 389

Categorization

• XREF: Daft Punk’s arc instantiates Marx’s retromania thesis about the present lacking a forward-looking cultural identity. — connects to: Late-2000s electronic pop continues a mode of synthpop curtailed in the mid-1980s — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1244; Electronic dance music moved from formal innovation to production refinement across the 2000s — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1257