"It’s much easier to start with the control embedded in your personality, you know?" Bangalter says.

I ask if, like Clark Kent, who aspired to a normal life he could never really have, they ever feel trapped by the decision to put on superhero costumes all those years ago—that they have to be these robots now, whether they want to or not. Actually what I ask is:

_Is there ever a moment where you’re like, "I have to put on the fucking cape again"? _

De Homem-Christo, confused, turns to his bandmate. His English is very good but prone to occasional breakdowns in response to stupid questions. "Fucking what?"

Bangalter switches to French—C’est comme, "Ah, merde, encore on met la cape de super-héros." C’est comme les mecs qui sont—then turns back to me: "No."

"No, we don’t," de Homem-Christo says.

Daft Punk, they say, is something that happens only when they want it to. Superman has to be Superman all the time.

"We work a lot," de Homem-Christo says, "but we are not in the superhero costume—"

"Every day," Bangalter says.

"Every day," de Homem-Christo says.

We get up from our table, wander past some menswear stores and an open-air lot selling giant plastic figurines—a dragon, a big fiberglass Marge clutching a big fiberglass Maggie. Everyone we pass looks like they’ve illegally downloaded at least one Daft Punk album, possibly all three. No one gives them a second look.

They say it’s hard to talk about the new record without talking about the old ones. "Homework, we did it, and it was a way to say to the rock kids, like, ’Electronic music is cool,’ " Bangalter says. "Discovery was the opposite, of saying to the electronic kids, ’Rock is cool, you know? You can like that.’ " Human After All—noisy and dense and a little bummed out, like something they wanted to be done with in a hurry—was about questioning the craft and seemingly effortless pleasures of the first two. It was a deliberately imperfect record, like a Jackson Pollock painting, or, says Bangalter, "a stone that’s unworked."

For a while, around 2005, they quit writing music altogether. They made Electroma, a wordless road movie about two helmet-wearing robots who long to be human and ultimately self-immolate out on a California salt flat. (Variety: "If auds thought Gus Van Sant’s Gerry and Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny were slow and pretentious, they should get a load of Daft Punk’s Electroma.") They started touring again, stood at the center of a gigantic blinking pyramid in front of hundreds of thousands of people, kept at it through the 2008 Grammys, where they performed "Stronger" with Kanye, and then stopped before anyone had time to get used to their presence. Skrillex, the 25-year-old dubstep wunderkind who in many ways has inherited Daft Punk’s mantle as the mainstream-crossover dance musician of the moment, told me that seeing Daft Punk perform in Los Angeles in 2007 "is when I realized I really wanted to make dance music."

Eventually they tried to make a new album using laptops, but gave up because everything they wrote felt lifeless. "Those tools were very good at many things," Bangalter says, but they were worthless in terms of "generating emotion as musical instruments."

The entire time they were expecting, even hoping, to be made irrelevant. Electronic dance music had never been more popular—has never been more popular than at this very moment—but to their ears it sounded derivative, safe, like a wan copy of something they themselves had done a decade prior, back when they were trying to overthrow their own elders. "It’s always this thing where we’re constantly waiting for something that will come in electronic music that says, ’Daft Punk sucks!’ " Bangalter says. "That’s actually much more interesting and exciting than someone who is paying homage."