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The sun was setting on the opening night of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival last weekend and the mood backstage in Justice\u2019s<\/a> artist compound was simmering anxiety, masked by glasses of wine and discreet vaping.<\/p>\n In a few hours, the Paris-based electronic music duo would debut an all-new stage show and give fans an early taste of \u201cHyperdrama,\u201d its new studio album, out April 26. The setting was meaningful: Justice played its first real show at Coachella in 2007<\/a> just before releasing \u201cCross,\u201d the album that propelled it to the forefront of the electro scene, and this appearance would be its first big concert since 2018.<\/p>\n In the eight years since Justice\u2019s \u201cWoman\u201d LP arrived, dance music subgenres have risen and fallen in favor, yet the pair has remained indifferent, focused strictly on its own trajectory. \u201cHyperdrama,\u201d a 13-track album with guest appearances by Miguel, Thundercat and Tame Impala, riffs on its longtime aesthetic \u2014 melodic hooks, funky bass lines, the occasional blown-out fuzzy beat \u2014 and stretches out in fresh ways.<\/p>\n Though Justice\u2019s Gaspard Aug\u00e9 and Xavier de Rosnay were joined by friends and former collaborators, many of whom had flown in from France, the two remained on the fringes of the backstage gathering, periodically conferring with their longtime lighting designer, Vincent L\u00e9risson, or Pedro Winter, the manager who discovered them in the early 2000s. The new show is a complex production built largely around L\u00e9risson\u2019s massive, swirling display, which took over 18 months to create and involves 11 tons of lights and kinetic motors on trusses. Justice prides itself on its precision, and knew there were hundreds of things that could go wrong.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The pair finally took the stage just before 10:30 p.m. and faced each other in Celine suits and sunglasses, unleashing intertwining grooves from across its discography. Songs from \u201cHyperdrama,\u201d like the four-on-the-floor thump of \u201cNeverender\u201d and the relentless \u201cGenerator,\u201d<\/a> fit seamlessly with \u201cD.A.N.C.E.,\u201d<\/a> the buoyant single that earned its first Grammy nominations, and the scuzzy strut of \u201cPhantom.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The next morning, sitting by the pool of their Airbnb clad in an open-collared Hawaiian shirt (Aug\u00e9) and a short-sleeved leopard-print button-up (de Rosnay), the duo dissected its approach to performances with its usual strict attention to detail.<\/p>\n \u201cA record is not meant to be fully understandable the first time you listen to it,\u201d de Rosnay, the chattier of the two said, in an interview conducted in English. \u201cA live show, it has to be fully understandable whether you know us or not, which is the case in festivals. There might be a lot of people coming where they just know one song, they just heard of the band, or they\u2019re maybe 17 years old and they\u2019re like, \u2018Oh yeah, my dad used to listen to that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Aug\u00e9, 44, and de Rosnay, 41, met through mutual friends when they were young graphic designers, later deciding to commit themselves fully to music. \u201cAt some point we just had to choose, would you rather spend your life in front of a computer or spend your life in front of a computer?\u201d Aug\u00e9 deadpanned.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n They were both children of MTV\u2019s video age, but Aug\u00e9 listened to more heavy metal and later the output of the British indie label Warp Records, known for its forward-thinking electronic music, while de Rosnay embraced hip-hop, which led him to older funk and soul tracks. Their early recordings were made in the free Apple software GarageBand, using samples from Italian horror scores and R&B jams. Sheering off the smoothness and predictability of the era\u2019s European dance music, they created party soundtracks that felt dangerous yet sophisticated.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Earlier in their career, Justice would get frustrated when collaborators couldn\u2019t transform the ideas that were in their heads into reality. Over the years, they\u2019ve become more understanding, but not less exacting. The art director Thomas Jumin has worked on multiple Justice projects, dating back to the video for \u201cDVNO\u201d<\/a> from 2007. He created the album art for \u201cHyperdrama\u201d \u2014 the latest version of Justice\u2019s cross motif \u2014 which took a year and a half to produce, and the discussions about it stretched back even longer.<\/p>\n \u201cThey like to try many different things around every idea to make their choice,\u201d Jumin wrote in an email. \u201cThere are a lot of sketches and tests to decide if a detail, a color, or an effect is valid or not, and I know they have the same path in the studio. It\u2019s a long process.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cCross\u201d was followed by the grandiose \u201cAudio, Video, Disco\u201d<\/a> in 2011, which charted on Billboard\u2019s all-genre Top 200. \u201cWoman\u201d<\/a> didn\u2019t match its success, but the group remixed its live show and won a Grammy in 2019 for the result, \u201cWoman Worldwide.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Though the award came in an electronic dance music category, Justice has had an ambivalent relationship with the genre \u2014 and the idea of genre, itself. With its members\u2019 leather jackets and stage stacked with Marshall amps, people perceived Justice\u2019s debut album as a rock \u2019n\u2019 roll take on electronic music. \u201cThe imagery led people to think that it was a heavy metal influence, but it was more distorted funk,\u201d Aug\u00e9 said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Alexander Ridha, who records and performs as Boys Noize, was living in Germany when he got a copy of one of Justice\u2019s first singles, \u201cWaters of Nazareth,\u201d<\/a> and was captivated by its embrace of distortion and aggression. He played it at a Berlin club when minimal techno was at its peak and immediately emptied the dance floor. \u201cIt was clear that this was the future,\u201d he said during a recent call. \u201cI had this really rare feeling of, \u2018I\u2019m onto something, but nobody knows it and nobody feels it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Aug\u00e9 and de Rosnay spent two years touring behind \u201cWoman,\u201d another working on \u201cWoman Worldwide\u201d and then a year putting together the concert film \u201cIris: A Space Opera by Justice.\u201d The pair started making \u201cHyperdrama\u201d in February 2020, then paused until June since they couldn\u2019t be in the studio together at the height of the pandemic. The pair\u2019s guiding intention was to bring back a sense of playfulness in how they make music and reconsider some of the lessons they\u2019d mastered. \u201cYou start learning about rules and ways things should be made,\u201d de Rosnay said, \u201cbut the truth is that in most cases, things sound better if you just take a side step.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Galvanized by the structural incoherence of the rapper Travis Scott\u2019s multipart 2018 smash \u201cSicko Mode,\u201d<\/a> they fused three songs into one on the lead single \u201cOne Night\/All Night,\u201d<\/a> which features guest vocals from Tame Impala\u2019s Kevin Parker<\/a>. Justice also found unexpected inspiration in gabber, a pummeling dance music subgenre from the Netherlands that can reach up to 190 beats per minute. Several of the songs on \u201cHyperdrama,\u201d including \u201cAfterimage\u201d and \u201cIncognito,\u201d use a technique where Justice created a track incorporating gabber elements, then treated it almost like a sample \u2014 pitching the tempo down and harmonizing it to make something more melancholy.<\/p>\n The biggest departure in \u201cHyperdrama\u201d comes during the album\u2019s third quarter, where the duo leaves the dance floor behind and heads into cosmic territory. The dreamy three-song stretch of \u201cMoonlight Rendez-Vous,\u201d \u201cExplorer\u201d and \u201cMuscle Memory\u201d is \u201calmost like one track that goes through different states of consciousness,\u201d Aug\u00e9 said.<\/p>\n When Justice performs, it usually places some mics in the crowd to hear how people are reacting. At Coachella, the group told its sound engineer to cut them entirely so it could concentrate completely on the performance. It left the duo feeling a bit isolated, so they stole glances whenever they could to gauge the response. (The crowd was feeling it.) When it was over, Aug\u00e9 and de Rosnay patted each other on the back, looking a little stunned that they\u2019d pulled it off.<\/p>\n Back at their compound, their friends greeted them with applause. There had been some mistakes, even if only they noticed them, and the celebration didn\u2019t last long. The next morning, when asked how the rest of the night was, Aug\u00e9 replied, \u201cQuiet.\u201d They were already thinking about rehearsals and the adjustments that they had to make for Coachella\u2019s second weekend.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n