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Legendary Dance Duo Justice Opens Up Ahead of Coachella Return, With ‘No Idea’ Who Their Fans Are Now

Justice's Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay reflect on 'Hyperdrama', working with Tame Impala, Coachella and more in a Billboard interview.

Their 2007 debut, Cross, brought a fresh, swaggering, hard-edged rock aesthetic — “like the Led Zeppelin of the electronic scene,” says their longtime manager, Pedro Winter — to their native France and the world beyond, and it arrived just as blogs and file-sharing platforms fundamentally shifted how audiences access music. But the strength of those early singles helped Justice get booked for Coachella in 2007, appearing on the lineup’s bottom row; two months later, Cross came out, becoming a critical and commercial hit despite the fact that making it had been, as de Rosnay puts it, “a struggle at every level, because we had no idea what we were doing” (the duo had also just bought a computer for the first time two years prior). four years later, its sound had changed again (de Rosnay calls that album “inspired by our love of agricultural ’60s British rock”), along with almost everything about how music was distributed and the broader dance landscape: The EDM boom’s neon and MDMA world was the sonic and spiritual opposite of Justice’s dirty jeans and cigarettes vibe.

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