Moon Safari

Godin and Dunckel produced and recorded the album themselves in Paris, at the studios Around the Golf and Gang, between April and June 1997. Stéphane Alf Briat recorded and mixed it, the mixing at Plus XXX Studios in Paris, and Nilesh Patel mastered it. Strings were recorded at Abbey Road by Peter Cobbin, to arrangements by the English arranger David Whitaker. Dunckel said the duo were too shy to speak to the orchestra, so Whitaker took them to his home in the countryside, where they ended up discussing Rachmaninoff, and that helped them make something massive and expressive. New Star in the Sky (Chanson pour Solal) came from his study of astrophysics and from reading Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, whose characters go on a safari into the past. He loved the word safari.

Godin said someone lent him a 1960s Höfner bass, the model McCartney played, and that he ran it through his guitar amp for a cool, dry sound. He found Beth Hirsch, his neighbor in Montmartre, who sings on All I Need and You Make It Easy. He compared the result to a space-age Carpenters.

Release and reception

Sexy Boy was released as a single on 9 February 1998, Kelly Watch the Stars on 4 May and All I Need on 9 November. The album reached 6 on the UK chart, 7 in Ireland and 21 in France. It is certified double platinum in the UK, gold in France and Germany, and platinum in Belgium and the Netherlands, and it had sold 386,000 copies in the United States by February 2012. Alexis Petridis of Mixmag called it superbly inventive, and John Mulvey of NME praised the band's grasp of melody and a reckless way with a vocoder that left them unafraid of sounding like a digital ELO. Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone was more reserved, though he praised the range of styles. John Bush of AllMusic later wrote that it delivered the emotional power of great dance music.

Rolling Stone ranked it number 93 among the albums of the 1990s, and Rolling Stone France ranked it number 65 on its list of essential French rock albums. It is in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. A tenth anniversary edition in 2008 added a bonus disc and a DVD with Mike Mills's tour film. Pitchfork's Mark Pytlik called the debut superb in his review of that reissue, and noted that its demo of You Make It Easy dates from when it was an instrumental called Bossa 96. Dave Depper of Death Cab for Cutie recreated the whole album in 2021, and Vegyn reimagined it for a Parlophone release in 2025.