All good things come to an end, and even robots power down. After four studio albums, two tours and 28 years of service, legendary electronic duo Daft Punk have moved from “is” to “was.” It’s a simple change really, as the sentence that marks their storied career remains: Daft Punk was the most conceptual and influential electronic musical act of its time.

Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter met in 1987 as students at Lycée Carnot, a Parisian secondary school that counts among its alumni a former French President, an expressionist painter, a Nobel laureate, philosophers, prime ministers, a sci-fi author and others.

Like many kids in many schools, the friends started bands and recorded demos. For six months in 1992, they formed a rock trio called Darlin’ with Laurent Brancowitz. They wrote four songs and released an EP, which Dave Jennings of Melody Maker infamously derided as “a daft punky thrash.”

In Bangalter’s own words, it “was pretty average,” so Darlin’ broke up. Brancowitz went on to play guitar in the extremely successful alt-rock band Phoenix, and the other two turned to embrace the underground sounds of Paris’ bubbling warehouse rave scene. Gay clubs and French castles pulsed with samples of disco and soul repeated and stretched into euphoric mantras. French Touch, as a style, was gloriously simple and unimaginably effective.

Taking their name from their failure, Daft Punk released a song called “The New Wave,” (later called “Alive”) in 1994. In 1995, they released “Da Funk,” a stomping, side-winding synth riff that the duo told Swedish magazine Pop #2 was inspired by weeks of listening to Warren G’s 1994 G-funk masterpiece, “Regulate.” Britain’s big beat heroes The Chemical Brothers liked it, incorporating the song’s upbeat robotic snarl into their live shows. Daft Punk needed a manager.

Enter Pedro Winter, a Parisian rave promoter as lanky as he was enthusiastic. He helped the band sign to Virgin Records, navigating the relationship to be more like a partnership, as Daft Punk valued creative control above all else. Their debut album was recorded using a make-shift “studio” that David Guetta once described as “two small Mackeys, 8tracks connected together, a ghetto blaster, no real monitor and… only one compressor on the master.” It was made at home — well before “bedroom pop” became a widely accepted genre — so they called it Homework.

That album dropped in 1997, and rocketed the top of the underground. Music videos directed by Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze made Daft Punk oddball favorites on MTV. Bangalter and Homem-Christo obscured their faces, wearing paper bags over their heads in interviews and smudging their pictures on the album art. They never wanted to be the center of attention. They wanted the music to speak for itself.

The duo did tour that year, a trek later documented on the incredible live record Alive 1997. Breakneck bleep-bloops and white noise tidal waves explode in a style that defines itself. The duo wasn’t wearing masks then, but they would soon put them on and never again be seen without them.

Settling back into their studio, the duo took a risk on nostalgia, setting forth to record a disco-inspired album called Discovery. I once heard a rumor they wrote the song “One More Time” and then sat on it for two years, waiting to see if it sounded “timeless.” During this time, they concocted a cool story about a studio explosion that left them disfigured and close to death.

“We did not choose to become robots,” Bangalter is reported to have said. “We were working on our sampler, and at exactly 9:09 a.m. on September 9, 1999, it exploded. When we regained consciousness, we discovered that we had become robots.” From then on, they appeared in full body suits, topped with light-up helmets that change ever so slightly for each musical era, setting a new (and subsequently much-followed) standard for producer anonymity in the process.

Discovery came out in 2001, a weird, sleek, and at times borderline-cheesy amalgamation of pounding 4/4 beats, robo-Van Halen guitar shreds and extraterrestrial wah-wah’d funk. It was far from an expected sound for the era, but it did become a global h