Justice told us why they love Osheaga and Quebec French

If bursts of creative energy are temporary, they can always come back. For Justice, that moment is now.

The French duo of producers Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay catapulted themselves into dance music’s elite back in 2007 with their blistering debut album Cross — a classic record that not only influenced artists in the EDM boom to come, but still sounds fresh and ferociously hard-hitting today.

After two albums — 2011’s Audio Video Disco and 2016’s Woman — that couldn’t quite recapture Cross’s strength and consistency, plus a solo album by Augé (2021’s Escapades), Justice are back with their fourth LP, Hyperdrama.

The album finds Justice sounding more confident and revitalized than they’ve been in ages. Augé and de Rosnay tapped several high-profile guests (Tame Impala, Thundercat, Connan Mockasin, Miguel) for the album to help update their sound for 2024.

Hyperdrama is a collection of songs that are swaggering and at times chaotic, while boasting some of the strongest melodies and most inspired production the Parisians have put on tape since their debut.

Cult MTL caught up with Augé and de Rosnay two days prior to Hyperdrama’s late-April release, a few days after they’d played two hugely successful Coachella sets. The duo debuted their new live show at the iconic California festival, and will bring it to Osheaga in Montreal in August.

While they consider it one of the world’s great festivals in general, Justice’s most lasting memory — like many artists before and after them — of playing Osheaga comes down to one thing: the top-notch catering.

“They have the best catering of all the festivals in the world,” de Rosnay adds. “It’s so easy to make bands happy — you just serve good food, and you know you’re going to have them in your pocket already. It’s good, diverse, healthy, fresh.”

Another standout memory from past Justice shows in Montreal, de Rosnay jokingly says, is the infamous strip club La calèche du sexe, before explaining that Montreal feels foreign to them in a good way, despite being another French-speaking part of the world.

“We can feel at home when we come to Montreal or Quebec, but on the other hand, it’s very exotic to us,” he continues. “I bet it’s as exotic as people coming from Montreal and going to Paris, and having Paris syndrome and feeling overwhelmed and oppressed by the Parisian environment. Montreal feels very different to us, and it’s great.”

Though French artists typically enjoy playing in Montreal as it’s their sole opportunity during a North American tour to address crowds in their native tongue, de Rosnay also gives us a history lesson on Quebec French versus the European variety.

“The truth is that French as spoken by the people of Quebec is much more refined than French French. It’s proper French,” he says.

“Untainted French,” Augé interjects.

De Rosnay continues, “That’s the real (French) language. We speak a mutated version of French in France, for the worse.”

Justice’s new approach to performing should leave plenty of fans thrilled and rejuvenated as their live shows have done for nearly two decades. Fans watching them at Coachella were ostensibly lapping it up — take the social media reaction when people first heard album opener “Neverender,” for instance.

“While we were preparing, we could only imagine how people were going to react to the music, because it’s very speculative,” says de Rosnay. “We were saying, ‘Okay, we can build up that track like this. It’s probably going to make people scream.’

“One thing we didn’t expect was for ‘Neverender’ to work that well. When it kicked in, we could see that the reaction was immediate with people for a song that they’d never heard before.”

Augé and de Rosnay worked on Hyperdrama for three and a half years — writing, researching and producing, then trying to edit everything to make it sound more spontaneous and surprising.

Justice’s meticulous yet highly intuitive approach to making this album saw them make 10 to 15 mixdowns of the same song, before going back to the first demo and analyzing why it felt good to them, and how to recapture that feeling.

“The first time we listened to the mastered record the day after it was finished, I really felt emotional listening to it, and still surprised by the choices we made,” de Rosnay says.

“Taking one step back, we were quite confident that we achieved this kind of ‘freedom’ album. Some of the things still sound surprising even after six months now.”

From start to finish, the album feels like an event fully aiming to live up to its title. The cover artwork depicting their iconic cross logo with a see-through bionic skeleton inside suggests you’re in for a high-energy listen. “Muscle Memory,” for example, recalls John Carpenter soundtracks from horror movies, a genre that’s as hyper-dramatic as they come.

“To us, it’s an album of pure fantasy that unfolds, that rips everywhere,” says de Rosnay when asked about the title choice. “We really see it as a mutating shape or form that’s changing. It’s something fantastic where everything is over-exaggerated, oversaturated — but more in terms of colours and sound. Over-bright, over-slick, over-rough, over-everything.”

Augé and de Rosnay wanted to avoid influences from decades past that have permeated their previous work — metal, classic rock and ‘70s disco, for example. (“There’s no nostalgia on this record, really,” says de Rosnay.)

The album’s focus became trying to make music that sounded as futuristic and modern as possible, even on somewhat disco-esque tracks such as the single “One Night/All Night” and the rollercoaster-like “Incognito.” These two were also among the album’s first fully-formed songs, along with the Connan Mockasin-assisted “Explorer.”

The aforementioned “Neverender” is one of the duo’s strongest tracks in years, and the first of two songs on the album featuring Mr. “Did you know he’s only one guy?” himself: Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker (the other being “One Night/All Night”). Justice are longtime admirers of the Aussie auteur, even turning down the opportunity to remix 2012 single “Elephant” because they felt they couldn’t improve upon it.

Given that Parker is a notoriously meticulous perfectionist, one would think there could be difficulty merging his vision with Justice’s. Luckily, no such problems arose.

“In that regard, we’re all as problematic as each other,” de Rosnay says. “We had this impression that it would be easy to work with him based on what we heard from Tame Impala since the beginning, and seeing how it evolved. We always had this impression that it would be a natural match.”

Hyperdrama not only comes 17 years after their debut, but also after much change and evolution in the dance music world since then. After the halcyon days of the late aughts and other Ed Banger acts like Breakbot, Uffie and SebastiAn came the early-2010s EDM boom, but Justice have endured and stood strong through it all.

The changes Augé and de Rosnay have seen in that world since they started making music together have been vast, but none of them have affected their artistic approach.

“Everything has changed, but we’re also very hermetic about it in the sense that we don’t let any of those changes influence or concern us while we’re making music,” de Rosnay says. “We’re ready to operate on our own terms, even if that means reaching a smaller audience than if we were playing the game of social media and TikTok, or trying to make music that’s algorithmically friendly.”

De Rosnay acknowledges there’ll be a big gap between how they hear the album and what fan response to Hyperdrama will ultimately be. But he’s proud of how it turned out, and of its freshness.

“When I listen to it, it doesn’t sound like a vintage record from a vintage band that’s been making music together for 20 years,” he continues. “Somehow, it still sounds very playful, and it sounds like two people having fun making music together and experimenting.” ■

Justice play the Green Stage at Osheaga on Sunday, Aug. 4, 9:15 p.m., individual single-day tickets $165, $320 Gold, $685 Platinum, individual weekend passes $395/$745/$1620. This article was originally published in the July 2024 issue of Cult MTL.

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