The sun was setting on the opening night of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival last weekend and the mood backstage in Justice’s artist compound was simmering anxiety, masked by glasses of wine and discrete vaping.
In a few hours, the Paris-based electronic music duo would debut an all-new stage show and give fans an early taste of “Hyperdrama,” its new studio album, out April 26. The setting was meaningful: Justice played its first real show at Coachella in 2007 just before releasing “Cross,” the album that propelled it to the forefront of the electro scene, and this appearance would be its first big concert since 2018.
In the eight years since Justice’s “Woman” LP arrived, dance music subgenres have risen and fallen in favor, yet the pair has remained indifferent, focused strictly on its own trajectory. “Hyperdrama,” a 13-track album with guest appearances by Miguel, Thundercat and Tame Impala, riffs on its longtime aesthetic — melodic hooks, funky bass lines, the occasional blown-out fuzzy beat — and stretches out in fresh ways.
Though Justice’s Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay were joined by friends and former collaborators, many of whom had flown in from France, the two remained on the fringes of the backstage gathering, periodically conferring with their longtime lighting designer, Vincent Lérisson, or Pedro Winter, the manager who discovered them in the early 2000s. The new show is a complex production built largely around Lérisson’s massive, swirling display, which took over 18 months to create and involves 11 tons of lights and kinetic motors on trusses. Justice prides itself on its precision, and knew there were hundreds of things that could go wrong.
The pair finally took the stage just before 10:30 p.m. and faced each other in Celine suits and sunglasses, unleashing intertwining grooves from across its discography. Songs from “Hyperdrama,” like the four-on-the-floor thump of “Neverender” and the relentless “Generator,” fit seamlessly with “D.A.N.C.E.,” the buoyant single that earned its first Grammy nominations, and the scuzzy strut of “Phantom.”
The next morning, sitting by the pool of their Airbnb clad in an open-collared Hawaiian shirt (Augé) and a short-sleeved leopard-print button-up (de Rosnay), the duo dissected its approach to performances with its usual strict attention to detail.
“A record is not meant to be fully understandable the first time you listen to it,” de Rosnay, the chattier of the two said, in an interview conducted in English. “A live show, it has to be fully understandable whether you know us or not, which is the case in festivals. There might be a lot of people coming where they just know one song, they just heard of the band, or they’re maybe 17 years old and they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, my dad used to listen to that.’”
Augé, 44, and de Rosnay, 41, met through mutual friends when they were young graphic designers, later deciding to commit themselves fully to music. “At some point we just had to choose, would you rather spend your life in front of a computer or spend your life in front of a computer?” Augé deadpanned.
They were both children of MTV’s video age, but Augé listened to more heavy metal and later the output of the British indie label Warp Records, known for its forward-thinking electronic music, while de Rosnay embraced hip-hop, which led him to older funk and soul tracks. Their early recordings were made in the free Apple software GarageBand, using samples from Italian horror scores and R&B jams. Sheering off the smoothness and predictability of the era’s European dance music, they created party soundtracks that felt dangerous yet sophisticated.
Earlier in their career, Justice would get frustrated when collaborators couldn’t transform the ideas that were in their heads into reality. Over the years, they’ve become more understanding, but not less exacting. The art director Thomas Jumin has worked on multiple Justice projects, dating back to the video for “DVNO” from 2007. He created the album art for “Hyperdrama” — the latest version of Justice’s cross motif — which took a year and a half to produce, and the discussions about it stretched back even longer.
“They like to try many different things around every idea to make their choice,” Jumin wrote in an email. “There are a lot of sketches and tests to decide if a detail, a color, or an effect is valid or not, and I know they have the same path in the studio. It’s a long process.”
“Cross” was followed by the grandiose “Audio, Video, Disco” in 2011, which charted on Billboard’s all-genre Top 200. “Woman” didn’t match its success, but the group remixed its live show and won a Grammy in 2019 for the result, “Woman Worldwide.”
Though the award came in an electronic dance music category, Justice has had an ambivalent relationship with the genre — and the idea of genre, itself. With its members’ leather jackets and stage stacked with Marshall amps, people perceived Justice’s debut album as a rock ’n’ roll take on electronic music. “The imagery led people to think that it was a heavy metal influence, but it was more distorted funk,” Augé said.
Alexander Ridha, who records and performs as Boys Noize, was living in Germany when he got a copy of one of Justice’s first singles, “Waters of Nazareth,” and was captivated by its embrace of distortion and aggression. He played it at a Berlin club when minimal techno was at its peak and immediately emptied the dance floor. “It was clear that this was the future,” he said during a recent call. “I had this really rare feeling of, ‘I’m onto something, but nobody knows it and nobody feels it.’”
Augé and de Rosnay spent two years touring behind “Woman,” another working on “Woman Worldwide” and then a year putting together the concert film “Iris: A Space Opera by Justice.” The pair started making “Hyperdrama” in February 2020, then paused until June since they couldn’t be in the studio together at the height of the pandemic. The pair’s guiding intention was to bring back a sense of playfulness in how they make music and reconsider some of the lessons they’d mastered. “You start learning about rules and ways things should be made,” de Rosnay said, “but the truth is that in most cases, things sound better if you just take a side step.”
Galvanized by the structural incoherence of the rapper Travis Scott’s multipart 2018 smash “Sicko Mode,” they fused three songs into one on the lead single “One Night/All Night,” which features guest vocals from Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker. Justice also found unexpected inspiration in gabber, a pummeling dance music subgenre from the Netherlands that can reach up to 190 beats per minute. Several of the songs on “Hyperdrama,” including “Afterimage” and “Incognito,” use a technique where Justice created a track incorporating gabber elements, then treated it almost like a sample — pitching the tempo down and harmonizing it to make something more melancholy.
The biggest departure in “Hyperdrama” comes during the album’s third quarter, where the duo leaves the dance floor behind and heads into cosmic territory. The dreamy three-song stretch of “Moonlight Rendez-Vous,” “Explorer” and “Muscle Memory” is “almost like one track that goes through different states of consciousness,” Augé said.
When Justice performs, it usually places some mics in the crowd to hear how people are reacting. At Coachella, the group told its sound engineer to cut them entirely so it could concentrate completely on the performance. It left the duo feeling a bit isolated, so they stole glances whenever they could to gauge the response. (The crowd was feeling it.) When it was over, Augé and de Rosnay patted each other on the back, looking a little stunned that they’d pulled it off.
Back at their compound, their friends greeted them with applause. There had been some mistakes, even if only they noticed them, and the celebration didn’t last long. The next morning, when asked how the rest of the night was, Augé replied, “Quiet.” They were already thinking about rehearsals and the adjustments that they had to make for Coachella’s second weekend.