Some bands drop twelve records in nine years — “and then choke on their own vomit,” as Xavier de Rosnay puts it, deadpan. Justice? Four albums in twenty. No filler, no fatigue. Just precision. Their silence is not absence. It’s architecture.
Now, after setting Europe ablaze with their new Hyperdrama tour, Xavier and Gaspard are heading west. Next stops: the U.S., Canada, Mexico then Australia. The French duo that made distortion divine and disco dangerous is back on American soil. And no, it’s not a comeback. It’s a next level.
Hyperdrama, released in April 2024, is less a return than a reconfiguration. An electric, genre-bending maze where funk meets gabber, soul melts into machine, and every guest — from Thundercat to Tame Impala — lands like a coded transmission. The fans got it. The Grammys did too.
We met them in Paris, backstage at La Cigale, fresh off the final date of their European leg. One speaks. The other cuts in like a scalpel. Together, they sculpt silence, light, and rhythm into something close to religion.
Justice doesn’t fill the void. They shape it. Just two silhouettes. One glowing cross. And enough tension to light up the dark.
Rolling Stone: Hyperdrama feels eerily tuned to the chaos of now. Was that deliberate — or just the ambient noise of a generation short-circuiting?
Xavier: We’re too old to be perfectly in sync with “now.” Maybe when you’re 20, 25 tops, you move with the times. After that, things get heavier. Desire gets choosy. Our music doesn’t try to comment on the world — it reflects how we see it. Some may hear a pulse. Others, a lifeboat adrift in time. Both reads are valid
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Hyperdrama sounds like a Marvel villain. Or a mental state. Or a new kind of opera. Where did that come from?
Xavier: We wanted to forge a word that didn’t exist. “Melodrama” had the right vibe — theatrical, over-the-top, full of story. That was the launchpad. Then it mutated: “melo” became “ultra,” then “hyper.” Suddenly it clicked — fast, high-pressure, cutting-edge.
You’ve called this record is ‘more light-filled.’ Is that a pivot from Woman, a mirror of the moment, or just a new palette?
Xavier: It’s mostly more fun — in the manic sense. This album never sits still. Nothing rests. Nothing takes itself too seriously. From the jump, we wanted to unlearn what we knew. Break the usual habits. Skip the expected resolution. What happens if you strip everything away — and let something else explode? We build around loops. Always. Then we stretch, bend, push — until something new cracks through. That one bass note, dropped three minutes in, that rewires the whole track; That’s our sweet spot. After Image, last third — that still gives me chills.
Was Hyperdrama mapped like a screenplay — or born in chaos?
Xavier: Both. If it were a movie, it’d be a Hollywood blockbuster: Spielberg behind the lens, Tom Cruise sprinting through the frame. No script. No lyrics. Just enough space for you to write your own story. But structurally? Every move is planned like a heist. Hook them in ten seconds. Give comfort. Then — twist. A little chaos. Not too much, just enough to keep the eyes wide. Then: lift-off. Climax. Applause. Fade to black. Same thing live. The set is a story.
Gaspard, you once said that with Justice, “drama is hidden — but never lukewarm.”Would you say Hyperdrama is your most sincere record?
Gaspard: Sincerity in music is always relative. We don’t write in a confessional way. Our lyrics are meant to be easy to remember and understand — without being totally dumb either, which, let’s face it, happens a lot in electronic music (laughs).
If there’s a form of sincerity in Hyperdrama, it comes from something else: the stripping-down. We let go of the idea of crafting the perfect pop song, verse-chorus structure and all, and moved toward something more minimal. That’s maybe where a more honest emotion can break through.
You’ve described the sound as a “sonic substance that can’t be broken down.” Is that a cultivated myth — or a real kind of mystic pursuit?
Xavier: A pursuit, no doubt. I love listening to music without being able to reverse-engineer it. Like with movies — the second you see the wires, the spell breaks. With Hyperdrama, we didn’t want listeners thinking: “Oh, that’s a Moog bass, that’s a Juno pad.” The goal was fusion. No instruments, no stems — just one dense block of sound. Organic and synthetic, indistinguishable. Samples and live playing, melted together. Even what sounds “natural” is often heavily processed.
Lead vocals? Treated like instruments. On Neverender, for instance, you can’t make out a single word Kevin says for thirty seconds — and it still lands.
You’ve called the album cover a “mechanico-organic vessel.” What’s the story behind this alien cocoon?
Gaspard: I pictured some kind of living mass, trapped inside a hyper-clean shell — like a sci-fi embryo in a glass case. It echoes what Xavier said about sonic fusion: a material you can’t break apart. We started with layers. Stacked textures, stacked ideas. Then we peeled everything back. It was a long process — more sculpture than painting. Each excess had to go. Every “too much” called for a “less.” There’s a lot of repentance in this record.
On Hyperdrama, the clash between melodic sweetness and rhythmic violence feels sharper than ever. Where does that taste for contrast come from?
Gaspard: That tension is baked into the DNA of Justice. At home, we listen to the sappiest stuff — glam rock, yacht rock, the Beach Boys… Pure melody. Pure feeling.
Xavier: I call it gentleman virgin music — that golden era when guys finally let themselves be fragile. Singing about heartbreak. About the girl who doesn’t call back. But when it comes to electronic music, we gravitate toward the opposite: rawness, dissonance, noise. Unresolved tension. And that friction — between soft and savage — is what keeps us going.
Let’s talk gabber. You flirt with it on this record like never before. What does that genre let you express — and how do you go from gabber to disco without losing your mind?
Xavier: Gabber’s got this naïve brutality to it. Almost charming. It’s absurd music — carnival melodies, deranged cartoon FX, hyper-sped James Brown horns — all slammed onto a concrete-hard base. We love playing with that in DJ sets. But what excites us most is slowing it down. Stretching it. Letting the hidden layers breathe. That’s when soul and funk start to peek through. The most recycled gabber sound? A brass stab from James Brown. On Generator, when we dropped the tempo, it started to sound like Getaway by the Salsoul Orchestra. Same phrasing. Same swing. Except… no strings. Just vacuum cleaner noises.
Whether it ends in melancholy or mayhem — is each track a happy accident, or a mission from the start?
Xavier: Always mapped. From the first demo. For example, After Image was born from a precise idea: start with a gabber skeleton, slow it down, harmonize it, flood it with melancholy. Same with One Night: take that same gabber chassis, and bend it until it becomes sad disco. And when Kevin Parker sang over it… he brought the exact kind of fragility we were chasing.
Your featured guests are no longer ghosts — they’ve got faces, names, voices. Why the shift?
Xavier: Justice has always been a duo. In the past, vocals were just another layer — meant to blend, not stand out. This time, the voice stepped forward. Thundercat’s tone — somewhere between jazz and pop — has its own emotional charge. And Kevin Parker? We’ve had him in mind for ten years. That falsetto, that weightless head voice, that tenderness… it clicked. The moment we played Neverender, his name was the only one that made sense.
You no longer dig through crates. You create your samples. Is that about control — or legacy?
Xavier: Control, 100%. Sampling the traditional way gets frustrating fast: bad tuning, rigid tempos, weird textures that don’t bend. So we started recording our own source material — built for flexibility. It saves us 900 hours digging through crates. The downside? No more surprises. No more accidents. That spark of stumbling on a forgotten gem… gone. Daft Punk were the kings of that. They could turn half a second of groove into a global anthem.
Ever secretly danced to your own track?
Xavier: Not exactly danced… but I once vibed hard to one — without realizing it was ours.
I was at JFK airport, heard this track on the speakers and thought: “Not bad. We could use that as inspiration.” Pulled out my recorder… and realized it was Genesis, in a Cadillac ad. (laughs)
You’re heading out on a US tour — a symbolic place for Justice. When did that bond start?
Xavier: Way before Coachella. Our very first gigs were in L.A., when the spotlight was still on New York — The Rapture, LCD Soundsystem, all that post-punk noise.
L.A. had no “scene” then. So the kids claimed ours. Maybe they were just hungry for something new to rally around.
Gaspard: As teenagers, we were obsessed with ’70s–’80s America. In France, ’90s TV was always running twenty years behind. So our American dream was formed… in VHS quality.
Do you tweak the show by continent?
Xavier: Never. From day one, we chose precision over improvisation. Each night’s goal is simple: deliver the best possible version of that show. Everything is controlled — but not automated. Even the lights are triggered live. It’s like a David Copperfield illusion: the first six months are spent dissecting every detail. Now? We can slip the handcuffs in under 30 seconds. (laughs)
For your stage design, you’ve chosen light over video. Why?
Xavier: That video-heavy aesthetic — very techno — doesn’t suit us. We didn’t grow up in rave culture. Onstage, figurative images steal focus from the music. Light, on the other hand, lets us tell abstract stories. We worked with Vincent Lérisson, a theater lighting designer from Théâtre de Chaillot in Paris, who also worked with Philippe Decouflé. The starting point was simple: how do we light a stage using only white — in a hundred different ways? Since then, everything’s been stripped down. No more set, no more Marshall stacks. Just an empty stage that transforms.
There is a video signal backstage, but it only controls the lights. It’s the lights that translate the image — not the other way around.
The Marshall amps are gone — but the cross remains. Could you ever let it go?
Xavier: It’s no longer physically there, but it shows up in flashes of light. We asked ourselves that very question: should we get rid of it? No one agreed. In the end, the cross left the stage — but not people’s minds. After four albums and dozens of visuals built around it, dropping it now would be like quitting the army three days before discharge.
What do the Grammy Awards mean to you?
Xavier: There’s something emotional about them. For Neverender, our managers called me while I was working in Sweden. It felt like a birth… OK, I’m exaggerating — but not that much. Grammys aren’t objective. Music isn’t. They don’t say “this is the best track,” they say: “this is your moment.” It’s a way to spotlight a newcomer — or to honor a journey. That’s what Woman Worldwide was about.
Gaspard: The Grammys are still part of an American dream for us: Michael Jackson with eight trophies and cop sunglasses… Winning one is a wink to that mythology.
You’re linked to the French Touch. How would you define it?
Xavier: Musically? There’s no real definition. Daft Punk, Air, Phoenix, Cassius — none of us sound alike. What connects us is more of a vibe: a kind of French romanticism. A bunch of friends reinterpreting Anglo influences with a local twist. Air? Floating elegance, à la française. Phoenix? California rock, but made in Versailles. Daft Punk? Chicago house, refracted through Paris suburbs. And Justice? A Japanese tourist dreaming of Paris — steps off the RER, gets cursed out by a guy on a scooter, bombed by a pigeon, and pickpocketed. The Paris Syndrome. (laughs)
And if the French Touch were measured in metrics, yeah — maybe David Guetta and DJ Snake are its biggest flag bearers now.
AI is entering the music world. Intrigued — or concerned?
Xavier: Intrigued, for now. Like any tool, it depends how you use it. If the prompt sucks, the output sucks. AI can spit out something impressive — but not necessarily good. Without a strong idea, it’s just a trick. That said, it lowers the barrier: you don’t need a 40-track studio or a symphonic orchestra to make a record. It’s about ideas, not money. That’s exciting. But it also opens the floodgates to billions of average tracks. Scarcity is gone. And there’s no going back.
Gaspard: Humans choose convenience. There won’t be a mass awakening like: “Wait! It was made by AI? I refuse to listen.” We’ve already crossed that line. Some K-pop bands are fully generated — face, voice, video — and they’re killing it. But I do hope it sparks a punk backlash. A real DIY return.
Xavier: That’s how it usually plays out. First, we rush into the future. Then someone pauses and says: “Hold up… what if we actually cooked again?” AI reminds me of frozen food in the ’80s. People were amazed — “Just add water, voilà: powdered bolognese!” Then came the moment:“Wait a minute… what if we made something real again?”
