Expecting Robot Rock, Digital Love or even a return to the housey days of Da Funk? You’d be better off revisiting those old records again because this is not the Daft Punk you’d expect. Or maybe it is considering we’ve known all along that the French duo of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Man de Homem Christo would be releasing a film score and not an official studio album.

But still, that little caveat won’t soften the blow to fans who were hoping that Daft Punk’s return to our stereos five years after Human After All would be a little more, well, them. After all, with Tron Legacy – the film for which they’ve composed 22 accompanying pieces – Daft Punk had seemingly found the perfect source of inspiration for their unique brand of robotic electronica. The original 1982 Tron is an admitted personal inspiration for the Frenchman and the Tron brand shares much of the detached, futuristic mystique that comes packaged with Daft Punk as artists and cultural figures.

After at least two whole years of hype and anticipation for what the Daft Punk/Tron Legacy union would bring – the flames for which were chiefly stoked on this very website – we have our result; although some fans have and will call it a disappointment from Daft Punk, the duo’s soundtrack is in fact a striking piece of work and an impressive step forward for dance music’s most iconic duo.

Don’t believe me? That’s fair enough because the slow, nodding arrangements and the 100-strong orchestra backing the robots throughout the Tron Legacy score could scare off the most ardent Daft Punk fan. But beneath that cinematic sheen there is indeed the signature of Daft Punk, the ‘master-code’ to riff on the film’s narrative thrust. It’s more them than you might first think.

Take the thundering C.L.U. for instance: after a torrent of bombastic horns and oscillating strings in comes some chugging, distorted beats and some enveloping electronic flourishes. The same again on Recognizer with the producers wiring faint synths to the grand-scale orchestra.

Indeed, Daft Punk perfect this marriage of organic and digitial, cinematic with electronic on Tron Legacy, a fitting thematic match for the tech-universe of Tron, not to mention Daft Punk themselves.

For the biters among us it’s not all orchestral extravagance with Daft Punk showing off their electronic roots on a number of tunes such as the utterly banging Derezzed, the looping Arena and with the infectious throb of End of Line. The pick of the bunch is probably the title track which pulsates with squiggling synths and compressed drum machine snaps. What makes it even more memorable is that the tune updates the same soaring motif which Daft Punk develop with different orchestral arrangements throughout the score, going from an expansive organic sound to tightly wound electro waves.

That thoughtful construction and precision execution on the duo’s part elevates their Tron Legacy soundtrack to a legitimately great score, but it also makes it a great Daft Punk album. Without understating the immense skill that’s behind their three studio albums, Daft Punk have been a career as genius producers, but they’ve never shown themselves as virtuoso musicians. They built iconic hits out of obscure samples and vintage sequencers and then picked apart all their material for an unforgettable live experience, but with this score they show themselves to be inventive and inspired composers, working with sounds and instruments beyond their comfort zone and excelling at it as they go. This is next level Daft Punk. And we are all privileged to join them as they grow into artists of the most outstanding calibre.

Daft Punk’s Tron Legacy Soundtrack is out now through Disney/Universal. For more of ITM’s coverage on Daft Punk in ‘Tron Legacy’ and the film itself hit up the Tron Legacy All About Page.