The Parisian dance duo reflect on their electrifying new album, Hyperdrama, where their connections with music and other musicians were pivotal to its creation.
French electro titans Justice have been in the game for over 20 years and have cemented themselves as one of the world’s biggest electronic acts throughout their career.
To the unsuspecting listener, Daft Punk they are not – while they were responsible for slick, club-centric music, Justice leaned into grit and a hard-hitting edge. Their 2007 debut, Cross, bridged rock aesthetics with electro house and remains a defining bloghouse record. Its continued relevance fits nicely with the ongoing indie sleaze revival.
After two sleeker nu-disco records – their previous, Woman, released in 2016 – the Justice duo of Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé followed it up eight years later with Hyperdrama, their triumphant, galvanic return to the spotlight.
Justice
- Friday, 5 December
- John Cain Arena, Melbourne
- Tickets here
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Eight years is a massive gap between records, but during that time, they kept busy: “We finished our Woman cycle with the tour, Woman Worldwide – that was the live album from 2018,” Xavier says, taking the reins of speaking duties. “We started working on [Hyperdrama] in 2020, and in the meantime, Gaspard made his solo album Escapades.”
He adds: “We take our time to make things, and things take a lot of time to be made.” It’s already been a year since Hyperdrama’s release, which shows how crazy time flies – Xavier thinks the same.
Their prolonged time spent in the studio gave Justice the chance to write with a clear idea in mind. “We really wanted to make something playful,” Xavier says. “Playful in the sense that we treat music like it’s dough – always changing shape, moving, and just be fun to listen to.”
Hyperdrama is full of push and pull between rock, disco, and electro genres within the same songs. Generator has a real sense of aggression with its dark synth stabs but falls into a gorgeous string coda near the end. Dear Alan begins with a soulful nu-disco groove and closes out with an ascending Giorgio Moroder-esque synth progression.
The richness of their musical choices can be attributed to looking back at what they’d done as a band and the rules of music. Xavier specifically cites Gaspard’s solo album as having a huge impact on this notion.
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“Escapades is very rich harmonically, very European – almost like sacred music, in a way,” Xavier says. “We were like, ‘Let’s try to make something not less rich harmonically, but simpler, and richer at the same time.’”
They knocked it out of the park – sampling has been at the heart of Justice’s music, and Hyperdrama is no exception. It’s all about finding that ideal groove. “We just work until we have one loop that is something perfect for us,” Xavier says.
Rather than sampling records like most French filter disco, they wrote the music first to make it progress in unpredictable and continually shifting ways. So, it’s easy to look at Hyperdrama as the culmination of every musical flavour Justice has to offer. When I ask whether that was intentional, Xavier tells me “yes and no.”
“When we make music, we’ve always incorporated everything that we love and everything that’s influenced us,” he says. “It’s part of who we are, and we can’t help it.”
Despite this, they were vigilant in keeping the music fresh. “There’s almost no specific retro references,” Xavier reveals. “It’s definitely more based in the present and in the future.”
He elaborates further: “We’re not thinking, ‘Oh, let’s make a disco track like in the seventies.’ Even when we were recording those disco parts with live instruments, we were trying to make them sound like today. We didn’t go into the retro world at all.”
The freshness of Hyperdrama is also credited to the list of contemporary talent who’s put their artistic fingerprints on the record: Thundercat, Miguel, Connan Mockasin, and of course, our homegrown neo-psych hero, Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, who appears on Neverender and One Night/All Night.
Justice also made room for emerging talent: alt R&B singer RIMON and psych pop duo The Flints lend their voices on Afterimage and Mannequin Love, respectively.
It’s no secret that Hyperdrama is an incredibly collaborative effort. Without them, the album would be so different. “They all have such strong personalities,” Xavier says, “like the moment they step into your house, they start changing the sofa and they’re repainting the walls” – although a comment partly made in jest, the record wouldn’t be the same without their touches.
More guests entering Justice’s doors on this large scale was something they always “wanted to do.” “We’ve been in love with their music for a very, very long time, but what they represent as musicians,” Xavier shares, “In the sense that they are musicians that are almost fully autonomous.”
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Then, for a moment, Xavier speaks less like a musician and more like a music fan, which is perhaps the crux of being a musician in the first place. He very graciously lauds some of the album’s collaborators on how they’ve “reshaped the musical landscape on a very big scale by doing things that are not mainstream.”
“It’s very specific music. Like [Tame Impala’s] Let It Happen, it’s a seven-minute song that is very repetitive. It’s a mantra. It’s almost like a trance record. And it’s something that everybody has listened to, everybody knows this track – it’s crazy.”
Xavier continues: “Thundercat has that too. Connan Mockasin, even if he’s not a stadium act, has influenced so much. He’s almost created a whole scene of music – you can hear him in Mac DeMarco, as you can hear him in Frank Ocean. He’s a bit like your favourite musician’s favourite musician.”
What’s most important when working with other people is getting them “in their natural environment.” Xavier acknowledges that he and Gaspard have a “twin kind of communication” where they might not always be fun to hang out with, but they “try to create an environment that puts everybody at ease to get the best out of each other.” Judging by their admiration towards their collaborators, it seems there was no trouble getting comfortable.
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All this circles back to their return down under. They’re bringing Hyperdrama and their rapturous live show back to Melburnian soil on 5 December at John Cain Arena – one of their first performances here since 2018. What are they most looking forward to?
“It’s to show people what we’ve been working on and what we’ve done,” Xavier reveals. Still, they recognise it’s not an ordinary experience: “Being on stage is not natural for us. It makes us very anxious, very self-conscious.”
“We’re almost like cavemen,” Xavier jokingly adds, but his next response is very candid.
“Every seven or eight years, that’s the only moment where we can witness actual people actually listening to our music. It’s almost like we’re all in the same room and for one hour and a half, we’re all going to be listening to the same thing.”
Now, that time has come – that love Justice have for music, Xavier assures they’re eager to share it with everyone in Australia once again. “We love the result, and we love seeing people having fun and connecting with the music – that’s worth it.”
You can get tickets to see Justice play live in Melbourne at John Cain Arena on 5 December here.
