It would be the easiest thing in the world to toy with Daft Punk fan emotions. The air has never been thicker with anticipation as the final months of 2016 count down, leaving us exactly 10 years since the last time Daft Punk touched road, the mythical moment the robots are said to be coming back.
Top 50 Feel Good Dance Songs of All-Time
They've only toured twice – once for Alive 1997, and once for Alive 2007. Their recent feature on The Weeknd's "Starboy" plus a strange post to Lollapalooza's website recently had fans gawking. However, Consequence of Sound and Pitchfork reported that Daft Punk has no plans to tour in 2017.
Now, a website with the url Alive2017.com has popped into existence, but there is much more to the site than meets the eye.
Users on Reddit and tumblr have decoded a treasure-trove of hidden hints. The landing page is a simple black screen with “ALIVE” written in white text, but zoom in, and a countdown counter appears. Along the “I.” It ends on Oct. 27, 2016, a date labeled as “Wake Date” in the site's metadata. There are also coordinates listed in the story-like code, corresponding to cities Paris, Los Angeles, London, New York, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Ibiza, and Indio.
That among other goodies have superfans super excited for a possible tour announcement on Oct. 27, but right now, the top post on Reddit appears to debunk the whole thing.
“I've been doing web hosting for around 20 years,” a user says. “Based on 5 minutes of poking at their domain setup and IP space, this website has nothing to do with the infrastructure hosting daftpunk.com and looks very amateur, while daftpunk.com looks very professional.”
Or maybe it's to throw off the scent? Billboard Dance has reached out to the robots' reps for comment and will update this story accordingly.