Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter announces ‘Mirage,’ an 8-track electronic minimalism album for ballet, out June 5 via Erato Records
Thomas Bangalter has never been interested in repeating himself. Three years after Mythologies, his first post-Daft Punk release and an orchestral score for the ballet of the same name, the French composer has announced Mirage, an eight-track album of electronic minimalism due June 5 via Erato, the classical music label that also released Mythologies. The album collects the music Bangalter composed for Mirage, a ballet for 16 dancers commissioned by the Ballet of the Grand Théâtre de Genève, which premiered at the Geneva opera house on May 6, 2025 and has been touring Europe since. The first preview, “Mirage: part II,” arrives on streaming platforms April 24. The ballet was conceived by Belgian choreographer Damien Jalet and Japanese contemporary artist Kōhei Nawa, continuing a creative partnership between Bangalter and Jalet that previously produced CHIROPTERA, a 2024 soundtrack for a dance performance at the Paris Opera House. For Mirage, Bangalter drew from the techniques of Greek-French avant-garde composer Iannis Xenakis, one of the earliest architects of electronic and stochastic music, whose influence gives the score its particular density and textural weight. A press release describes the album as “a vast and atmospheric piece of electronic minimalism,” and the official trailer, which shows the 16 dancers arranged in a circle as their movements are blurred and stuttered, suggests a work interested in the boundary between human bodies and electronic sound.
The Architect Behind the Mask
Since Daft Punk’s dissolution in 2021, Bangalter has constructed a solo career that has moved consistently away from the dancefloor and toward the concert hall and gallery, without apology and without any apparent nostalgia for the robot helmets. Mythologies was an orchestral work. Daaaaaalí!, his 2024 film score for director Quentin Dupieux, was an absurdist left-field commission. Chiroptera Matiere Premiere followed. Now Mirage extends the logic of each of those projects: a composer working at the intersection of electronic structures, orchestral immersion, and abstract sound sculpture. That arc was briefly interrupted in a way fans could not ignore. In late February 2026, Bangalter played a rare public set alongside Fred again.. at the closing night of Fred’s USB002 London residency, performing a collection of Daft Punk material that Consequence of Sound described as looking “awesome.” The moment did not signal a reunion. It confirmed something more interesting: a musician who has fully moved on and can afford to revisit the past precisely because he is so committed to what comes next.
Art Basel and a Paris Installation
The June release of Mirage will be followed the next day by the opening of La Caverne du Pont Neuf, a large-scale public art installation on Paris’s Pont Neuf bridge, for which Bangalter collaborated with multidisciplinary artist JR on the soundscape. The installation, which turns the oldest bridge in Paris into a cavern, runs June 6 through 28 and pays homage to Christo and Jean-Claude’s The Pont Neuf Wrapped on its 40th anniversary. Bangalter has also confirmed a collaboration with Keinemusik’s Rampa for Warehouse Artefacts, an immersive experience debuting at Messe Basel during Art Basel on June 20. Mirage is available for pre-order now. It will be released digitally and on vinyl, CD, and limited edition Revox Tape.
