Alongside Daft Punk’s Discovery, the tracks compiled on The Upper Cuts constitute history’s cleanest specimens of late-’90s and early-2000s French house. Where the Chicago and Detroit artists who influenced them were in important ways extensions of gospel and funk, Alan Braxe and Fred Falke’s sound took the Eurocentric luxuries of ABBA and English synth-pop and brought them into a new context, conjuring fantasies of flying cars (“Rubicon”) and cybernetic playfriends without a mean line of code in their bodies (Stardust’s “Music Sounds Better With You”). And in the same way the rawer end of American house served as an analog to ’80s punk, the compact sweetness of the music here made house feel familiar to indie audiences in ways that changed 2000s indie pop, whether through artists like Annie (featured here) and Robyn or the full-band hybrids of LCD Soundsystem and Phoenix.