Justice: Photos From the Billboard Cover Shoot

On the scale of regular to rock star, being stuck in traffic leans hard into the mundane. And yet on a humid March afternoon in Texas, this is where I find Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay — the French electronic music legends better known as Justice.

Augé (44, bearded, tall, taciturn) is in the back seat of an air-conditioned Uber, texting. De Rosnay (41, clean-shaven, shorter, chatty) sits beside him, playing the trivia game on the tablet hanging from the back of the passenger seat, pressing answers with long, skinny fingers as the SUV lurches through the streets of Austin, gridlocked amid South by Southwest. (He gets most of them right — but asks for help when asked to identify New York state by its shape.) The pair arrived here yesterday from Paris, and de Rosnay’s luggage still hasn’t shown up. Last night he went on his first-ever Target run, to procure fresh underwear.

It’s cliché to assume that famous musicians exist in a fantasy bubble of perpetual ease, but you’d be forgiven for being somewhat perplexed by the idea of one-half of the revered duo buying a pack of Hanes at the self-checkout. Still, de Rosnay and his Justice collaborateur Augé look the part: the latter in a brown suit, a vintage ’80s T-shirt and a big belt buckle of gold metal forming the words “Beach Boys,” de Rosnay in dirty white Chucks, skinny black jeans and a black leather jacket strung with fake pearls. Streaks of silver run through his otherwise black hair, and the diamond stud in his left ear appears real. Both indoors and after dark, they keep their sunglasses on.

Read the full digital cover story here.