Music

It’s a warm Saturday night in Phoenix, Ariz. and the crowd is a mass of kinetic energy as Justice drops “Audio, Video, Disco,” a song that effectively sends the thousands of people assembled in front of the stage into collective overdrive. Fists thrust into the desert air as the song’s “audioooooo!” lyric swells in time with the kickdrum and lights — a primal response that’s essentially programmed into the show.
“It’s almost mathematics, almost pure physics, what makes people dance,” says the duo’s Xavier du Rosnay. “[Making] the live show was like white coat scientist work, because we were preparing the music and thinking ‘Okay, if we add 16 more bars of this, it will make the crowd response more efficient.’”

Justice has toured the U.S., Europe and Central American with this precise configuration of beats, lights, lasers, mirrors and music for the last 11 months, since releasing their fourth album, Hyperdrama, on April 26, 2024. The tour began with a headlining set at Coachella’s Outdoor Stage, where the French duo established another show routine now as predictable as the audience freakouts.

After the Phoenix set, du Rosney and Gaspard Augé jump offstage and spend a solid 10 minutes high fiving and shaking hands with audience members who’ve pressed themselves up against the barricades to make contact. Ever cool, the sunglasses the guys have worn for the duration of the show stay on, but after remaining physically stoic for the duration the 90-minute performance, they now smile as they say their hellos.

“The show is very cold in a way,” du Rosnay says a few days prior in Los Angeles, where Justice is spending a few days between performances. “We don’t interact with the crowd for three reasons: The first is that it’s not in our character. We’re not like, stage people, you know? Second, we are very focused on what we’re doing. And then, every time we get excited and try putting a bit of emphasis in the way we move onstage and then watch the video after…”

Augé moves his hand slightly and laughs, indicating that their onstage motions haven’t been quite grand enough to convey their enthusiasm.

“So at the end we go meet [the crowd] to say thank you,” du Rosnay continues, “because we don’t get the opportunity to say that during the show.”

For both fans and actual members of Justice, there is currently a lot to be thankful for. Last year at this time, Hyperdrama and its attendant live show were finished but unreleased, and du Rosnay and Augé were managing expectations, saying in a Billboard cover story last April that they “had no idea” who the average Justice fan was or how people would respond to the music from Hyperdrama, the followup to 2016’s Woman. It’s now all much clearer.

Hyperdrama has been exceptionally well-received by critics and longtime fans and has helped open the duo up to new audiences through the duo’s first ever chart hit, “Neverender.” Ubiquitous in 2024, the collab with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker marked Justice’s first ever radio No. 1, reaching the top of Alternative Airplay last month. It also won the Grammy for Best Dance/Electronic Recording at the Awards last month. Meanwhile “Wake Me Up,” their collaboration with The Weeknd out on the latter artist’s January album Hurry Up Tomorrow, gave Justice the first Hot 100 hit of their nearly 20-year career.

Justice

Andre Alves

Meanwhile the Hyperdrama tour is a face-melting cathedral assembled of kaleidoscopic lights, a rig that takez a 30-person team to operate — and which is so intense that the show is preceded by a warning that it “may cause discomfort and/or seizures for those with photosensitive epilepsy.” The show has turned new fans into believers and pre-existing fans into zealots. (In Phoenix, nearly every person I talk to in the crowd has seen the show at least once before.)

“It’s going much better than we thought it would, and we’re very appreciative of that,” says du Rosnay. But while reaching radio and winning awards is all exciting, the guys seem primarily delighted by meeting their fans, with du Rosnay and Augé finding that they really like the people who really like them.

“On tour when we do pop-up stores or events, we don’t do it in the hope of selling 20 more t-shirts if we show up to the store,” says du Rosnay. “We do it first as sign of gratitude for the people who show up, and also because we’re curious to see who those people are.”

“And they are so lovely,” Augé continues. “They make homemade stickers, fanzines.”

“And the main thing we noticed that’s made us very happy,” continues du Rosnay, “is that the crowd is much more diverse than it used to be in age, in gender, in every way. We see a lot more people who are not just like us. That’s the thing that’s made us the happiest.”

Justice fans, a demographic that began assembling when the guys released its era-defining debut single “We Are Your Friends” in 2006, have had ample opportunity to see and meet Justice. The guys have played more than five dozen festival and standalone dates on the Hyperdrama tour. Augé says they’ll likely tour the show until this December. After that, du Rosnay says that — as they have for previous tours — they’ll “pick a date and then dismantle everything” related to the live production “so that there can’t even be the temptation of saying yes to anything else.”

In the meantime, however, they’ve got more than upcoming dates throughout South America, the U.S. and Europe, with the stretch including headlining slots at festivals including Bonnaroo and Electric Forest. The operation is now smoother than its Coachella debut, when the guys were “so anxious and stressed,” about unveiling the production, du Rosnay says that “we were basically paralyzed on stage. We were just so focused and stressed thinking ‘okay, don’t fuck this up’ that we could barely move.” (While du Rosnay says there were some slight technical hiccups during this first show, they were not apparent to the naked eye.)

The nerves have decreased as the tour has moved through festivals and standalone shows at venues including The Holllywood Bowl and the Accor Arena in Justice’s native Paris. Setlists collect classics like “DVNO,” “Genesis” and “D.A.N.C.E.” alongside new tracks like “Neverender,” Woman” and “Mannequin Love,” the latter of which builds to a place of disco ecstasy, bolstered by the swirling shimmer of lights happening in tandem. Generally too, the show has become heavier and more ferocious, with the similarly chaotic “Stress” and “Generator” — spiritually similar tracks released 17 years apart — both getting major play.

In fact Augé calls this latter track, from Hyperdrama, “the barometer for if the show is going to get crazy. If the crowd reacts as it should” when the song is introduced early in the set, he says, “You can really feel the room vibrating, and you know it’s going be a good show.”

Another element of the performance that’s changed is their outfits. The tour began with du Rosnay and Auge both wearing sharply cut white suits from, naturally, French fashion house Celine. Then last fall, “We had this talk with our friend Gesaffelstein,” du Rosay says, referring to the revered French producer who’s also been on tour this year, playing his show in a sparkly black suit and a black mask with eyes that glow red. “He has an amazing character on stage. He looks so good. We were talking about how far you can go in terms of dressing up on stage. We’re not shy, but we don’t feel that it’s necessary to be over the top.”

But with Gesaffelstein as inspiration, that thinking evolved. “After all,” du Rosnay says, “it’s meant to be fun and over the top.” He and Augé reconvened with the team at Celine and asked for something “more visible.” While Celine had previously suggested gold suits, “We were like, ‘No, we don’t do gold.’ Then we went back like, ‘Let’s do it.’”

Justice

Andre Alves

One song that’s yet to make it into the live show is “Wake Me Up,” a track Justice made with The Weeknd for the latter artist’s January album Hurry Up Tomorrow. (The release bore out the long-gestating rumors that the pair was working on something together.) The Weeknd first texted the duo “in 2021 or 2022,” recalls du Rosnay, asking them “to make something that sounded like an opening track, like classical music, and something very solemn.” They created this custom order and included a bonus 10 seconds of music that they thought could work for a drop.

“We told him ‘Okay, that’s the intro you asked for, but just for your information, it could go into something else,” recalls du Rosnay. “He was like, ‘Yeah, give me more of the thing that comes after.” They went back and forth on the song for a year, with the final product sampling English songwriter Rod Temperton and evoking the heavy mood of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

In terms of other forthcoming releases, the guys neither confirm or deny that they’re doing a live album for Hyperdrama, as they’ve done for all three of their previous LPs. Du Rosnay says they’re “thinking about it and just trying to find a way of putting it together.” He acknowledges that while “the metrics have shown us that nobody cares about our live albums,” that’s not exactly true, given that their 2018 live LP Woman Worldwide won the Grammy for best dance/electronic album. (Beyond that, du Rosnay says they have “no idea” when they’ll make another studio album, joking that given the five years between Audio, Video, Disco and Woman, and the eight years between Woman and Hyperdrama, it might be “10 or 12 years.”)

But despite the thrill of their live shows, as captured on previous albums and experienced by scores of people around the world, Justice does not, du Rosnay says, “have a passion for being on stage.” Rather, the effort is a function of “wanting to make something cool and to show it to people” and also because live shows are, He continues, “our breadwinning thing,” with theses financial considerations now especially important given the high cost of post-pandemic touring.

But while the songs are charting, the tickets are selling, the suits are shinier and there are more awards on the shelf, the current priorities are the same as they’ve always been.

“Same thing as before the album, or, like, 10 years ago,” du Rosnay says of what’s curently most important to Justice. “It’s to be happy, to be proud of what we do and comfortable with what we’re doing.

“There are so many things happening in these cycles that without noticing, you might start doing things that you aren’t comfortable with,” he continues. “It’s really easy, you know? You make one slight drift, and then you make another, and then three weeks later you’re doing something you thought you would never do in your life. So being at ease with what we’re doing, being proud and being happy, that’s the important thing.”