At
Metacritic, which assigns a
normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications,
Discovery has an
average score of 74, based on 19 reviews. Some listeners were confused by the more polished sound, the
heavy metal element of "Aerodynamic", and the use of Auto-Tune.
AllMusic's John Bush said that, with their comprehensive productions and
loops, Daft Punk had developed a sound that was "worthy of bygone electro-pop technicians from
Giorgio Moroder to
Todd Rundgren to
Steve Miller."
Q wrote that
Discovery was vigorous and innovative in its exploration of "old questions and spent ideals", hailing it as "a towering, persuasive tour de force" that "transcends the dance label" with no shortage of ideas, humour, or "brilliance".
Q named
Discovery one of the best 50 albums of 2001.
Joshua Clover, writing in
Spin, dubbed
Discovery disco's "latest triumph". He felt that while it "flags a bit" near the end, the opening songs were on par with albums such as
Prince's ''
Sign o' the Times'' (1987) and
Nirvana's
Nevermind (1991).
Mixmag called
Discovery "the perfect non-pop pop album" and said Daft Punk had "altered the course of dance music for the second time". Ben Ratliff from
Rolling Stone wrote that few songs on
Discovery matched the grandiosity of "One More Time". He found most of them "muddled – not only in the spectrum between serious and jokey but in its sense of an identity." In
The Guardian,
Alexis Petridis felt Daft Punk's attempt to "salvage" older musical references resembled
Homework but was less coherent and successful. The
Pitchfork editor Ryan Schreiber found the "
prog and disco" hybrid "relatively harmless" and said it was not "meant to be judged on its lyrics", which "rarely go beyond sensitive junior high poetry".
Robert Christgau, writing in
The Village Voice, facetiously said the album may appeal to young enthusiasts of
Berlin techno and computing, but it was too "French" and "" for American tastes. In a retrospective review for
The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004),
Douglas Wolk gave
Discovery three and a half out of five and wrote that "the more [Daft Punk] dumb the album down, the funkier it gets", with an emphasis on
hooks over songs. In 2020, Petridis said he had reconsidered his
Guardian review, describing the influence of
Discovery on pop production over the following years: "Daft Punk were incredibly prescient: play
Discovery today and it sounds utterly contemporary. My review, on the other hand, has not aged so well." In 2021,
Pitchfork included
Discovery on its list of review scores "we'd change if we could", upgrading its score from 6.4 to 10 out of 10. The
Pitchfork critic Noah Yoo wrote, "If scores are meant to indicate a work's longevity or impact, the original review is invalidated by the historic record. Daft Punk's second album,
Discovery, is the centerpiece of their career, an album that transcended the robots' club roots and rippled through the decades that followed."
Soft rock samples became commonplace in dance music. == Legacy ==