Last Friday an email showed up in Idolator’s tip box from the folks at Urb with the subject header “NEw Thomas Bangalter (Daft Punk) track (?),” and it quickly got lost in the shuffle of the day’s blogging. Turns out the track in question, a perfectly passable piece of French-style filter disco with the banal (if Valentine’s-appropriate) title “Love,” had apparently made its first appearance on the blog Headphone Sex very early that morning, the blog owner hinting that the song was left as a comment from a “TB” operating from “daftalive.com.” Headphone Sex boldly went ahead and labeled it as “THOMAS BANGALTER – LOVE,” and from there it didn’t take long for the blog dominoes to start falling as they usually do, with half a dozen or so quickly reposting the track and tentatively crediting it to the Punker, as the mysterious “TB” sparked further rumors by dropping into the comments boxes of other blogs. Still, not everyone was as convinced, and enough naysayers finally prompted an early adopter at Trash Menagerie to go to the source and determine whether “Love” was true robot rock or not.

So, to get to the bottom of this, today I shot off an email to get some clarification, and here’s the official word, straight from Daft’s management . . .

” Hi L – It’s of course not a new track from daft punk. It sounds really cheap…” – p

The producer of this “cheap” track turned out to be U.K. producer Louis La Roche, whose MySpace page now reads “I’m not Thomas Bangalter!” and who quickly took to the comments boxes himself to explain that he had no idea who was behind the totally not at all intentional leak/mix-up. (To be fair, this is not the first time a track has been mistakenly attributed to Bangalter at first. Eric Prydz’s delightfully crappy Steve Winwood-sampling “Call On Me” was widely credited to the filter king when it initially started floating around as any MP3 back in 2003.) If La Roche was the one behind the brief hoax, he should have worked the rumor mill a little longer. A Stereogum or Forkcast retraction would have put that MySpace “Profile Views” count through the roof.

Mystery Solved: Thomas Banglater “Love” Track Is A “Daft” Hoax [Trash Menagerie]
Louis La Roche [MySpace]