“Technology has made music accessible in a really philosophically interesting way, but when everybody has the ability to make magic, it's like there's no more magic.” —Thomas Bangalter

Daft Punk are standing on a helipad overlooking downtown Los Angeles as fireballs make their sequined suits glisten with hot heat. It's a few days before this year's Coachella, where the duo's shiny new duds will premiere by way of a Jumbotron trailer for their new album, Random Access Memories. But for now, only a very select few have laid eyes on the outfits—and everyone involved in today's photo shoot desperately wants to keep it that way.

This task proves to be somewhat difficult. The helipad is inside a public park, and there's a pedestrian path right next to it. Errant runners and bikers are all but inevitable, and if one of them decides to whip their phone out, snap a photo, and upload it to Instagram without breaking stride, this important piece of Daft Punk's meticulous rollout strategy will be ruined.

For the first part of the day's shoot, Thomas Bangalter (silver helmet) and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo (gold helmet) stand behind a wall of eight-foot flames. Members of the crew, some of whom wear white gloves in order to avoid smudges on the pair's glittering getups, remain vigilant for curious passersby. And as the fireball sequence begins, a guy is seen creeping up from a clearing off to the side of the helipad. He sits in the grass close by, shakily opens his backpack, and takes a sip from a water bottle. “Is that them?” he asks, brandishing his phone.

DJ Falcon, longtime friend of Daft Punk and one of many collaborators on the new album, rushes over. “The guy was in a trance,” recalls Falcon a couple of days later. “It's like he was thinking, ‘That's the picture of my life—I'm going to be the one who shows the world.’ I could feel the intensity.” So as the trembling fan tries to get his shot, Falcon sticks his arms up to block him, “like an NBA defender.” A park monitor notices the hubbub and screams, “Assault! Permit revoked! Shut it down!” Daft Punk retreat to their trailer. No more fireballs.

Eventually, the drama dies down enough for everyone to review the would-be paparazzo's camera phone footage. “It was just a video of me trying to protect my friends—jumping in front of the bullet,” says Falcon. “You couldn't see shit.”

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Zoom out for a second, and this entire scene can seem deeply silly: a group of adults frantically trying to hide the image of two Frenchmen in their late 30s wearing costumes that make them look like C-3PO after a well-tailored disco makeover. But once you spend any time with Daft Punk—or even just listen to their music, or watch their videos, or gawk at their live show—such protectiveness suddenly becomes understandable, even necessary. It's an instinct to keep the idea of mystery alive at a time when it seems to be in historically short supply.

The day after the pair's refurbished guises were revealed on Coachella's screens as planned—causing mad dashes and some of the festival's most excited outbursts—Bangalter says everything about RAM and its buildup is about the surprise, the magic. “When you know how a magic trick is done, it's so depressing,” he explains. “We focus on the illusion because giving away how it's done instantly shuts down the sense of excitement and innocence.”

This strategy extends to the album’s daunting and ambitious conception, which had Daft Punk recruiting some of the world's most gifted session players—guys who worked on classics by the likes of Michael Jackson, Madonna, and David Bowie—to lay down the beats, melodies, and chords bouncing around Bangalter and de Homem-Christo's heads. Not to mention full-on, mind-melding collaborations with a number of their idols and like-minded contemporaries including Chic mastermind Nile Rodgers, Pharrell, schmaltzy 70s singer/songwriter Paul Williams, Panda Bear, house deity Todd Edwards, and electro originator Giorgio Moroder. Plus: Everything was recorded onto analog tape in rarified recording palaces like New York's Electric Lady and L.A.'s Capitol Studios. Human spontaneity was coveted; computers, with their tendency toward mindless repetition, were not.

“Technology has made music accessible in a philosophically interesting way, which is great,” says Bangalter, talking about the proliferation of home recording and the laptop studio. “But on the other hand, when everybody has the ability to make magic, it's like there's no more magic—if the audience can just do it themselves, why are they going to bother?”