Daft Punk’s forthcoming album, Random Access Memories, is easily the most anticipated of the year thus far, with excitement spurred in part by the gradual and secret rollout campaign behind it.
So it only seems natural then that the French-duo would choose the global metropolis of Wee Waa, Australia— population roughly 2,000— as the location to first premier the album in its entirely.
The small Australian town, best known for being “the cotton capital of Australia,” hosts the annual agricultural event, Wee Waa Show, where 4,000 lucky people will be present for the public debut of the Robot’s latest album on May 17.The Wee Waa Show bills itself as a"a pet show, showgirl competition, cross cut saw competition, fireworks and much more.”
There’s been a number of theories as to why the group chose Wee Waa (or how they even knew about it) to first play the record. The most plausible is that the town is near the Narrabri Observatory—six 22 meter high satellite dishes, according to The Guardian—which would presumably be incorporated in some way in the “all-purpose stage” Daft Punk has reportedly promised for the event.
Of course, in typical fashion for Daft Punk and this album, the details are only gradually coming out, first appearing on WeeWaa.com, and only later being confirmed by other sources. One outstanding question is what will actually take place at the 79th annual Wee Waa Show. Will Daft Punk themselves be at the event for the audio playback? Could they end up performing it?
Meanwhile, in recent days we have learned more about the album itself. After being teased with snippets of the song at Coachella Music Festival and on Saturday Night Live, the radio edit version of the album’s first single, “Get Lucky”—which features the Neptunes’ Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers— was released last week. Spotify duly announced that the new single—the duo’s first in eight years— broke its record for the biggest first day of streams globally, and in the U.S. and UK was streamed more times than any song in a single day.
Having previously been told that Random Access Memories would feature several collaborations, the robots are gradually revealing the identity of those artists by posting videos of the collaborators explaining their experience working with the duo in Paris, where the album was recorded.
The band also did their first English-language interview about the album with Rolling Stone, telling the iconic magazine they have been working on it since 2008 and it finally came together when they ditched electronics and started using live instruments to record it.
At a concert in New York City over the weekend, Pharrell Williams—who in his own video on the duo’s website describes how the robots gave him some sort of holistic medicine to cure his jet lag and he subsequently could not remember even recording the single— performed “Get Lucky” for the first time live. Despite his memory lapse during the recording of the song, he was apparently happy with the final product as he then performed it two more times without stopping, which may seem excessive to anyone who hasn’t heard the incredibly catchy tune.