Instant Crush

Daft Punk’s back with a video for Instant Crush. Julian Casablancas is in a museum with two robot heads, and they’re in love with a plastic woman. By the end, everything’s on fire.

That’s it. Two robots that want something they can’t have, and the video just watches them want it until the whole thing burns. It doesn’t complicate it. No backstory, no reason, no lesson. Just the image and the fire.

There’s something specific Daft Punk does that makes it work. They’ve always understood that gap between what machines are and what they seem to feel. Two robots staring at something impossible—it’s not sad exactly, it’s something else. It’s beautiful because it can’t work, and it knows it can’t work, and it happens anyway.

I wasn’t expecting to care. They’d been gone long enough that I’d moved on, or thought I had. But then you see this image—two still figures in a museum, looking at something they can’t reach—and something lands. Maybe it’s just good production design. Maybe it’s that I know what it feels like to want something that doesn’t want you back. Either way, the video stays with you.