**2025 Stock. 180g One Translucent Red and one Blue Vinyls, Includes picture inner sleeves and a full-size (12") 20-page booklet with lyrics/text. ** Released in 2003 as Tour de France Soundtracks and later remastered simply as Tour de France, this eleventh studio album by Kraftwerk takes their long-standing fascination with movement and technology and applies it to one of their great offstage obsessions: road cycling. Conceived to mark the centenary of the Tour de France, it arrived seventeen years after Electric Café/Techno Pop, ending the longest studio silence in the group’s history and reintroducing them not as nostalgia act but as elder statesmen of a sleek, globalised electronic language. It is also the last Kraftwerk album to feature Florian Schneider, giving its meditations on endurance and the passage of time an added retrospective resonance.
At its core, Tour de France is about translating physical effort into sound. The album opens with “Tour de France 2003,” a three-part suite (“Étape 1–3”) where the pulse of the peloton becomes a matrix of interlocking drum patterns and cycling metaphors are recast as vocoder chants. Later tracks such as “Aéro Dynamik,” “Titanium,” “Vitamin” and “Elektro Kardiogramm” extend the concept beyond the race to the broader mechanics of the body under strain: heartbeats as kick drums, breathing rendered as filtered noise, lactic acid mirrored in the slow tightening of harmonic loops. Throughout, the production is ultra-precise and contemporary, folding in elements of techno, electro and minimal house, yet the pacing is unhurried, more like a long climb than a sprint.
Central to the album’s meaning is the decision to revisit and re-record Kraftwerk’s own 1983 single “Tour de France,” here presented in a new digital-era version that sits comfortably alongside the 2003 material. Where the original was a sparkling, almost standalone celebration of the race, the new version feels like a culmination: harmonically richer, rhythmically tougher, its breath samples and chain noises more deeply integrated into the mix. The cover art underscores the continuity, echoing the original’s cyclists-in-profile motif while subtly updating the design; the retitled 2009 remaster effectively places the song and the album on equal footing as parts of the same broader project.
Commercially, Tour de France became Kraftwerk’s highest-charting album, reaching number one in Germany and performing strongly across Europe, even as it skipped the US Billboard 200 for the first time since the early 1970s. Artistically, it provided the launchpad for an extensive 2004 world tour where the band’s now-classic four-laptop live configuration was fully deployed, synchronising audio, visuals and lighting into a single, tightly scripted performance system later documented on Minimum-Maximum. In hindsight, the record reads as both a late-career statement of purpose and an elegant synthesis: the human-machine dialectic that runs through Autobahn, Trans-Europe Express and Computer World is here reimagined in the most physical terms possible. Muscles, lungs and wheels become part of the circuit, and the listener finds themselves pedalling in place, locked into a rhythm that is at once brutally functional and strangely euphoric.
