The Sunday night headliner of the four-day Kilby Block Party festival in Salt Lake City last month was French electronic duo Justice, the project of longtime collaborators Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay. Their American tour this summer hits some historic venues like Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco and Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado plus the storied Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Tennessee, where they play a coveted late night Saturday slot after Olivia Rodrigo.
Known mainly in dance music circles but with worldwide recognition on tracks like “D.A.N.C.E.” from their 2007 debut, Justice has broken through to new indie music audiences recently with a song on their new LP, Hyperdrama, called “Neverender” featuring Tame Impala (the prolific Aussie Kevin Parker). The song has nearly 82 million streams and has spurred a bunch of remixes, too.
“It’s amazing, more than we were thinking of,” gushed de Rosnay backstage before Justice’s set that closed out Kilby. “I think this is the first time a song [of ours] is having airplay. When we were making this song, we felt good about it, but we were not, the three of us, high-fiving like, ‘Yeah, we made a song everyone will like!'”
Justice also reached massive pop music consumers when they were featured on The Weeknd’s track “Wake Me Up” at the top of this year. In this case, de Rosnay and Augé were attracted to the artist’s vision to build something in the classical music tradition. It’s not just about “making hits,” they repeated. The pair needs to be into the project creatively to devote the time, the talent and — my words, not theirs — the Justice brand to something.
“It’s a tricky thing to make music that might appeal to other people,” said de Rosnay. “We just do what we like to hear.” So that means, for Hyperdrama, they’d collaborate with up-and-comers like RIMON and The Flints just as readily as global superstar Miguel and beloved bass master Thundercat. “If we feel it is interesting, we are ready to jump in with really anybody, famous or not.”
Widely lauded as having the best live production operation in the game right now, Justice has their 2025 show down by “not quite the millisecond, but almost.” I learned from de Rosnay that “nothing is time-coded, the lights are operated by hand so like every bulb you see on-stage, there’s a guy on the other end pushing a button.”
Lights and movement, courtesy of a huge tech team of professionals involved in the “precisely written” production, means everyone is meeting their mark to make the jaw- and beat-dropping experience what it is every single night. (As someone who attends tenfold the number of rock shows as that of pop or dance music acts, I can vouch that this set is a breathtaking blast. Truly stunning. See for yourself.)
The acclaim of both Hyperdrama and Justice’s live show have put these Parisians in another echelon of electronic dance music. The break they took after 2018 release Woman Worldwide and its associated touring did overlap with COVID-19, a forced halt for performers of all types. But these years proved to be a fruitful time for Augé and de Rosnay, who patiently but consistently tended to the new songs that would be released as Hyperdrama. Working “in a more relaxed way was way more efficient,” said Augé, with periods in and out of the studio. Added de Rosnay, “It was longer, but we never had a moment of not knowing what we wanted to do or being stuck.”
As they revel in an expanded audience that is now “younger, more diverse” and at a “new level of dedication” than they’ve observed with previous albums, said Augé, they take more time at pop-up events and in-store signings to meet their fans. “It’s not so much to increase the sale of t-shirts,” said de Rosnay, but to see the faces and hear the stories of these people “in real life.”
The website hub for the duo’s secular music and merchandise is Justice.church, a domain I find funny but also somehow touching, so meaningful and maybe even spiritual are live music experiences for concertgoers. “Everyone is welcome at our church,” said de Rosnay wryly. “It’s a multi-faith church.”
Hear the full conversation with Justice from backstage at Kilby Block Party here and streaming via WNXP Podcasts. The Justice set at Bonnaroo is scheduled for late Saturday, or just after midnight on June 15.
