Do we like them?Do we like Thomas Bangalter?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful or dodgy surfaced in what we could open, but the pile of reporting we got through was small, so we won't go higher.
Bangalter is best known as one half of Daft Punk, the robot-helmeted French duo. In the last few years he has mostly stepped away from the dance floor and into the world of ballet and orchestral scores.
The latest chapter is Mirage – Ballet for 16 Dancers, released on 5 June 2026. Euronews reports it accompanies a ballet created by choreographer Damien Jalet and contemporary artist Kōhei Nawa, and describes it as a piece of electronic minimalism. He also planned a Swiss Art Basel event on 20 June, pairing a DJ set by Rampa with visual art by Julian Charrière.
On the harm check, we went looking for anything he has said or done about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, public health or the climate, and for dodgy collaborators. Nothing came up in the pages we could read. That's honestly a thin result rather than a glowing reference, because most of our page fetches were blocked.
His public stance on technology is on the record. In a 2023 BBC interview, reported by Official Charts, he said the duo were “always on the side of humanity and not on the side of technology.” He also said he wouldn't want to be a robot in today's world, which reads as a thoughtful, human-first position rather than a culture-war one.
On the good-person side, we found no court outcomes and no credible allegations against him, and nothing from established outlets about how he treats collaborators. We also found no verified charity work, so we can't give him credit there. He said he and his Daft Punk partner kept quiet about their work so as not to spoil the narrative while it was happening, which suggests he takes the art seriously.
So where does that leave us? A quiet, artistic figure with no red flags in what we could read, and not much on the plus side either. We'd happily listen, and we'd say so with a small asterisk about how much we could check.