On Wednesday (March 13), French electronic music duo Justice flew into Austin, Texas, from Paris for a rare appearance at SXSW. The duo participated in a featured session simply called Justice: In Conversation, moderated by Billboard’s Katie Bain.
While the pair discussed their lasting legacy, which dates back to the 2007 debut album Cross, they also revealed details about its forthcoming album Hyperdrama, out April 26 – its fourth studio album and first in eight years.
With its first three albums, Justice always released a live version soon after, with its last being Woman Worldwide in 2018. When asked if they plan to follow suit with Hyperdrama, de Rosnay quoted Mike Tyson: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth,” he says. “We move without a plan.”
It’s a true statement for the duo, who took three-and-a-half years to finish Hyperdrama. And now that it’s done, they are looking ahead to their immediate future, which includes a return to Coachella in April – and, as they confirmed during their featured session, a tour to follow.
“We’re super happy to come back [to Coachella],” says Gaspard Augé, speaking of when the duo made their live debut at the desert festival in 2007. ”It was a very significant event for us because we had just finished our first album and it was our very first live show, so it was a relief. It was a bit of a surprise for us because we never really dream about being musicians – and somehow, it happened.”
Below are the seven best takeaways from the featured session.
“We always keep in touch when we are not doing music, there are always a few ideas floating around,” says Augé. “For a long time we wanted to create our own samples and most of the new record is based on loops. Instead of crate digging old disco records we took the time to make our own samples. We always have our own desires and obsessions.”
Augé describes the new album as having a 90s rave aesthetic, saying “even if it’s not new, it’s a territory we haven’t been before. We took some elements of stuff we’ve always loved — because there is an energy in this 90s techno gabber [music] that we love — and we put it in some disco sauce. We wanted to have this confrontation between organic instrumental elements with very hard stuff without mixing them, but to juxtapose them between eras and genres.”
“For almost every song we have to write, produce and record the human version of it and then the electronic version of it, too,” says de Rosnay. “If you want to get the best out of it, you have to go to a studio and perform all those things.” He says what took the most time was finalizing the album, noting that he and Augé “can can sometimes have an almost unhealthy relationship with details” — hence creating more than 200 versions of the same song before making the final decision.
“By traveling a bit in the hardcore universe, we realized a lot of samples come from disco records,” says Augé. “Hardcore techno is sped-up disco, like 180 bpms…And then when we had a good loop, we could pitch it down and see how we could reharmonize it and make something more sensitive and melancholic. The album has a lot of diversity, but [doing that] gave us a good start.”
“We tried to unlearn a bit of what we knew as musicians and producers and try to step into making an album with a fresh heart — not even a fresh mind,” says de Rosnay. “We were listening to “SICKO MODE” by Travis Scott and that song was a huge hit; you have an intro, then 20 seconds of Drake then it goes to something else. We heard that and went, ‘Wow, we’re still thinking about music in an ancient way. Almost by reflex.’ So we tried to put all of that aside.”
The lead single off Hyperdrama, titled “One Night/All Night,” arrived in January and featured Tame Impala. “It’s been almost a decade or more that we had [Kevin Parker] in the back of our heads,” says de Rosnay. “We’ve been listening to Tame Impala forever. We had a revelation when before he released [2012 album] Lonerism [his label] sent us “Elephant” to ask us for a remix. We listened to the track and we had to turn it down because we told them it is perfect, there’s no way we can make something better. And we really understood at this moment that this band would become something else…We had no ide they would become a stadium band, but [knew] that they would become very significant.”
“You don’t strike me as TikTok dancing guys,” says Bain, to which de Rosnay replied with a smile, “You’d be surprised.”
In true French fashion, the musician was being a touch sarcastic, explaining: “We know there are things that are not for us. There’s so much of a gap between our albums that every time we come back with a new album we feel like rookies, because everything has changed in between. [With] TikTok, [like] everything else, there’s no good things or bad things, only things you feel inclined to do and things you do not. We just do things we feel like doing, and we’ve been lucky enough that from the beginning we can operate on a reasonably large scale without having to compromise on anything. We are not ready to make this sacrifice to have more fame.”