Seven years after the duo wowed the US by presenting a grand live son-et-lumière spectacle while wearing helmets covered in LEDs, it's worth noting that EDM's biggest star, Deadmau5, is a man who presents a grand live son-et-lumière spectacle while wearing a helmet covered in LEDs. Everyone seems to agree it was Daft Punk's Alive 2006-07 tour that kickstarted mainstream America's interest in dance music. The duo are to the US electronic dance music (EDM) scene what the Velvet Underground were to punk, in so far as it's hard to imagine the genre existing as it does without them. They had spawned a legion of imitators – among them Mirwais, producer of Madonna's Music – even before 2001's Discovery, an album that, for better or worse, defined the sound of pop in the 21st century: a decade later, you hear its Auto-Tuned vocals, filtered synthesizers, knowing 80s inflections and thudding sidechain-compression kick drums every time you turn on Radio 1. But equally, the weight of expectation attending Random Access Memories reveals how influential Daft Punk are held to be.

Perhaps this just tells you what dupes people are for hype: they've been manipulated like a sunburnt casualty's genitals by Random Access Memories' extremely well-planned pre-release campaign, with its mysterious teaser ads, slow drip of information about what the album contains and gushing video interviews with collaborators so brilliantly parodied on Will Ferrell's website Funny Or Die. Bizarrely, Daft Punk appeared to have won the festival without setting foot outside the backstage area: frankly, you wouldn't have wanted to be the band that had to follow their advert on stage. They whoop and cheer not merely the video for single Get Lucky but also the credits detailing its guest stars: Nile Rodgers, Pharrell Williams, legendary disco producer Giorgio Moroder, the Strokes' Julian Casablancas, veteran songwriter and film composer Paul Williams.

For another, there's the fact that the audience react as if Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem Christo are performing unannounced live set. For one thing, there's the very fact that, in the middle of a festival, someone's opted to get their phone out and film not a band, or their friends, or the sunburnt man with his eyeballs pointing in different directions who's drawn a crowd outside the dance tent by stripping naked from the waist down and manipulating his genitals in time to the music, but an advert being shown on the big screens. If you want proof that Random Access Memories is, by some distance, the most eagerly anticipated album of recent years, then here it is.

On YouTube, you can find cameraphone footage of an advert for Daft Punk's fourth studio album that was beamed out from the main stage at last month's Coachella festival.

Random access memories