The 20 greatest French touch tracks – ranked! – The Guardian

As Justice return and Cassius’s scene-defining album 1999 turns 25, we revisit the sample-powered, disco-fabulous sound that carried Daft Punk and others to fame
For the uninitiated, French touch is a wondrous style of French dance music from between the mid-90s and (debatably) the late 00s, based around house rhythms, funk/disco basslines, chopped-up vocal samples and heavy use of EQing so that the sound gets psychedelically compressed and expanded. All those elements are in the quintessential You Are My High, with the titular snatch of Stevie Wonder deployed for shameless hair-stroking, eyes-closing, “no mate I love you more” club experiences.
As the 00s rolled on and Daft Punk became the scene’s biggest and most influential stars, French touch gradually moved away from house and towards electro in what was known as “blog house”, played by people in American Apparel hoodies who looked as if they hadn’t eaten a vegetable in weeks. Purists will quibble but for me this style is an assured part of French touch, with funk intact and samples more finely chopped than ever – and this deep cut, with its deliriously brilliant melody, is an example of how the era made tinny compression a virtue (sometimes). Play as a 128kbps mp3 for maximum period authenticity.
With a vocal cut up so it sounds like someone arguing with you down an unreliable phone line, a classic piano-house rhythm and a reach-for-the-lasers extended breakdown, this is a secret weapon from latterday French touch. Para One was best known at the time for his remix of Daft Punk’s Prime Time of Your Life – it became the definitive version – and has since become film director Céline Sciamma’s go-to musical collaborator: he wrote the spellbinding Latin chant at the heart of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and the giant choral synthwave ballad in Petite Maman.
French touch-adjacent Parisian club kid Uffie was a sort of proto-Kesha rapping over beats that ranged from electro to Velvet Underground samples; US producer Armand Van Helden was clearly in thrall to French touch when he made the disco-sampling UK No 1 You Don’t Know Me. They combined on this glorious remix, with Van Helden brazenly dispensing with the original beat entirely, slotting in a one-bar loop from Black Ivory’s Mainline and bumping it so hard it picks up flecks of distortion. The sped-up Pharrell verse sounds superb and is a reminder of the sample-friendly special relationship between French touch and hip-hop (J Dilla memorably sampled Extra Dry by Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter, for instance).
Dealing chiefly in electro, including his Levi’s-promoting UK No 1 Flat Beat, Mr Oizo is also behind this meltdown-inducing track that cuts up Do It at the Disco by Gary’s Gang with scissors so blunt they’d be approved for toddlers. The track stutters, glitches and seems to fall off the decks altogether, but is all the funkier for it.
A much more smoothly finessed bit of disco sampling, complete with a brilliant half-second of disco-funkers Dynasty uniting the crowd: “Everybody!” Falcon is French touch’s great minimalist, putting his faith in the quality of his raw materials and the depth of the grooves he subsequently digs out of them; his inspired remix of Cassius’s La Mouche is built entirely from a single bar of the original track. He then went off to focus on surfing and photography, but triumphantly returned in 2022 with the ballad Step By Step alongside Alan Braxe and Panda Bear.
Bob Sinclar would go on to use endearingly cheesy whistled refrains on pop hits such as Love Generation – and he was always at the cornier end of French touch – but there’s also a real intensity to his early disco manipulations such as the Cerrone-sampling I Feel For You. Even better is Gym Tonic, which uses a Jane Fonda workout video for sweaty dancefloor commands (with Bangalter co-producing).
Both Daft Punk members made tracks outside of the duo – Bangalter tends to get a little more shine for his, but those made by partner Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo with Eric Chedeville as Le Knight Club are also stunningly good, lit with bright Ibizan sunlight. The wind-battered Intergalaktik Disco, high-tempo romance Chérie D’Amoure and insistently euphoric Hysteria are all keepers but Santa Claus, the very first release on Homem-Christo and Chedeville’s Crydamoure label, is still the best. French touch basslines have a wonderfully yearning quality and that’s absolutely the case here, while the disco guitar is triple-filtered and chilled into plumes of ice.
Unfairly just missing out on the UK Top 40, this should have been as big a hit as Modjo’s Lady (Hear Me Tonight), a French touch crossover No 1 the same year. Modjo did some very shallow cratedigging for their sample (Chic’s Soup For One), as do Superfunk for theirs, namely Chris Rea’s Balearic classic Josephine. But it’s expertly done with floor-quaking bass, and Ron Carroll’s vocal is affectingly sincere.
We in Music sat at the heart of the Parisian scene – the vocals are by an uncredited Benjamin “Music Sounds Better With You” Diamond and Homem-Christo’s younger brother Paul co-produces – and they meld the sample-spotting of Falcon or Bangalter with pure pop songwriting. It results in an ecstatic track that got unfairly lost in the post-Daft Punk major label scramble.
If blog house was what French touch became, it originally emerged from a very different style – a kind of lounge-y, Afro-Latin, rare-groove music in the 1990s, with tracks such as Alex Gopher’s The Child, DJ Gregory’s Elle, Pepe Bradock’s Deep Burnt and St Germain’s album Boulevard. It’s more tasteful cocktail bar than nightclub – but Prix Choc is undeniably great, with a hard-hitting house beat under the organ chords while the “sensimilla, marijuana” vocal fills the air with fragrant smoke.
The sophisticated mood of early French touch finds its banging apotheosis here as the urgent simplicity of a DJ Falcon-style rhythm guitar groove is topped with the kind of announcement – “sunshine people we are!” – made by henna-speckled hippies at an Ibizan yoga retreat. Even the most pallid goth-techno fan might fondly nod to this in the corner of a beach bar they’ve been dragged to on holiday.
Justice – returning this year with a big Coachella set – were the punk-rock antithesis to the disco-fabulousness of peak French touch, but the duo’s debut album is absolutely rooted in the sound: their masterpiece Waters of Nazareth is pure electro horror, but Genesis had knowing slap bass and DANCE and Phantom Pt II were laced with disco strings. Stress combines both moods, with Bernard Herrmann levels of dread in the violins but a strut to the beat like the Bee Gees in bovver boots, crunching those textbook French touch vocal samples underfoot.
The later blog house period certainly had some idiotic music, but that has left the good stuff underrated – and this is masterful, a complex piece of sound design that is also brutally, overbearingly funky. The disco bassline is mangled, while the one-note noise riff moonwalks across its broken surface; disfigured they may be, the hallmarks of French touch are scattered in the wreckage, with vocal samples now just gasps and pained yelps. (If this piques your interest, SebastiAn’s remix of Revl9n’s Walking Machine is his other masterpiece.)
A bassline with an outline as faint as a jellyfish, floating around a sped-up, maximally filtered Donna Summer sample: listening to the opening of 1999 is like snorkelling around the beat. But then with the still-cool announcement of “Cassius in the house!”, you’re hauled on to dry land and under the purest sunshine as the funky house rhythm kicks in. French touch at its most sensual and psychedelic.
Almost a sister track to 1999, using those filter-effects to access an eldritch and spectral mirrorworld. The intro to the Jets’s US Top 3 hit Crush on You is played as if in an echoing haunted house, the singers moving wraithlike around the rafters and crawling up your back – only for one of history’s great basslines to kick in and get the ghosts grooving. Surely a huge influence on Dua Lipa’s Don’t Start Now, too.
The duo of DJ Falcon and Bangalter released just two tracks and they’re both dance music hall-of-famers. Their self-titled single has a perfect bassline and an irresistible tendresse, even amid the cosmic whomp. But So Much Love to Give has the edge thanks to its 10 minutes of overwhelming euphoria, where a maximalist arrangement of in-the-red synths and repeated declaration of love is followed by the same maximalist arrangement of in-the-red synths and repeated declaration of love, this time with a whacking great bass drum added. The intellectual capacity of an entire dancefloor is erased when this gets played, replaced with pure dumb id.
Very unfairly held off No 1 in August 1998 by Boyzone’s wretched No Matter What, the only track from the trio of Bangalter, Braxe and Diamond is nevertheless etched in pop history. Centred around Diamond’s priapic vocal style and an irresistible lick from Chaka Khan’s Fate – you’ll try not to air guitar it while trying to be cool on the dancefloor, and you will fail – it’s actually Bangalter and Braxe’s filtered background production that makes it so distinct, with a whole universe of cosmic sound pouring out of that little Khan sample.
A reminder of the multiverses of sound contained in every recorded song, and the infinite possibility in sampling them. Ten seconds of Strokin’ by disco-funk group Dynasty (them again) becomes three-and-a-half of the most unhinged minutes in dance music history, as the late DJ Mehdi burns the sample until it’s collapsing and spitting out sparks, then Bangalter straps a kick drum to it and sends it skyward. The video was set among warring boy racers, and the track itself is an expression of gloriously overstimulated machinery.
It takes genius or even supernatural vision to spot a sample in the way Daft Punk did here: a one-second brass chord from Eddie Johns’ 1979 disco track More Spell on You is cut out and pitchshifted to form One More Time’s entire backbone. Unlike the purely synthetic tropical house and EDM that came after French touch, those trumpets, however manipulated, are still full of breath, effort and exuberance, humanising the track even as its creators dressed up as robots. Vocalist Romanthony also skips down the man-machine divide, using a vocoder but exhaling hard – “you can’t stop-AH!” – as dancers catch a breath in the long breakdown. The groove itself is mechanically quantised, and yet so limber. As the lyrics underline, One More Time is testament to the emancipatory, endlessly repeating and oh-so-human power of music.

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