Justice Came Back Just in Time for the Indie Sleaze Revival, but They Didn’t Plan It That Way

André Chémétof

A couple of decades after their debut EP and eight years since they released their last record, Justice is back with a new album, Hyperdrama, which arrives just in time to catch a wave of retro interest in the hipster culture of the early 2000s. The umbrella term is “indie sleaze”: think of Charli XCX referencing the once-ubiquitous aughts brand Von Dutch, The Dare doing LCD Soundsystem cosplay, and Snow Strippers sampling Justice themselves, on Lil Uzi Vert’s convulsive “Fire Alarm.”

But Justice’s Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé, both now in their 40s, aren’t interested. They even claim not to have noticed there was an indie sleaze revival going on, until a journalist told them.

“We are not very nostalgic about this period,” de Rosnay insists. “We had a lot of fun—we made our first album at this moment and it was a life-changing experience. But at the same time, we don’t look at it with the glasses of nostalgia, thinking, ‘Oh, that used to be the good old days… that would be cool, dressing up again like this or going to Cinespace and sweating in purple clothes.’”

So we won’t be seeing Justice in white Wayfarers and tacky flo-yellow T-shirts any time soon. But while they may not be prone to pining for their own jeunesse dorée, retro has always been part of Justice’s aesthetic. Each of their previous three albums wrapped itself in the costumes of pop history—hard rock and rave on Cross; prog on Audio, Video, Disco; pop and buoyant disco on Woman. Hyperdrama is their first record that doesn’t look back.

“There was not one time on this album when we thought, ‘Oh, let’s make a song like this song or that track,’” de Rosnay says. “It’s not a nostalgic record. It’s more like directed towards the present and the near-future.”

They worked on Hyperdrama for over three years, sculpting a sonic narrative that unfolds across thirteen tracks. It flits between glassy synthwave, luscious dance-pop, and molten electro-bass. “We think of our albums as pop records in the sense that it’s relentless,” de Rosnay says. “Full of emotions and it’s a bit of a rollercoaster.” Justice sequenced the album so it begins with uplifting tunes like the glistening “Neverender” that welcome listeners into their world. Imagining it’s a film, de Rosnay said the plot goes awry at “Moonlight Rendez-vous,” a sax-ridden slow-vibe that conjures a sleazy cigar lounge in deep space. The final few songs return to joyous radiance with the “fireworks” of “Saturnine” and “The End.” If anything, this music is the inverse of indie sleaze: soothingly warm, lyrically benign, clinically high-quality.

The album’s shimmery decadence feels perfectly calibrated for live-show catharsis and the kind of pyrotechnical festival spectacles the duo is known for. In April, they teased the album to a massive Coachella crowd of longtime fans and new listeners. A barrage of lasers beamed over the audience; tornadoes of foggy lights tore across the stage. The album’s title captures this high-definition intensity. “‘Hyperdrama’ sounded like it could be a next-level melodrama,” de Rosnay explains. “Everything is more digital, exaggerated, faster, because ‘hyper’ gives this connotation of speed and computer-generated.”

The music is a far cry from the scorched madness of “Waters of Nazareth,” the electro-rock fusion that put them on the map in the 2000s. It sounds like they’ve grown out of that raucous youth spirit. All the imperfections are flattened into a luxurious surface, with the rich voices of guests Miguel and Kevin Parker padding the beats like soft West Elm cushions. But that glossy quality is seemingly intentional. de Rosnay says they chose to move away from the grittier sounds of their early career both because they’re detached from the nightlife scene now—and because pristine music hits better on club and festival speakers. “There are only so many things you can make when everything is distorted and over-compressed,” de Rosnay says. “There’s an energy that we love about it, and at the same time, there’s a lot of details that you can’t put in there.”

The only exception to the album’s dreamlike drift is highlight “Generator,” which sounds warped in from the duo’s serrated 2000s days, wigging out like a cybernetic chainsaw with a sample of Joey Beltram’s hardcore siren “Mentasm.” What separates it from a typical rave rager is the funky bass and bizarrely elegant strings that appear midway. “As soon as we started unfolding the track, we saw that there was a window to flip it into something more eerie and orchestral,” de Rosnay says. “It’s the contrast that was appealing to us.”

While close contemporaries like Daft Punk now traffic in anniversary re-releases, Justice can’t handle the thought of coasting on nostalgia. “We hope we never do reunion tours,” de Rosnay says. “Reunion tours sounds a bit like a retirement.” Instead, they’re trying to push themselves beyond anywhere they’ve sonically gone before. “We feel that with this album and this live show, we still belong to the contemporary world and are not just a 20-years-old band rehashing the same formulas,” de Rosnay says. “Hopefully.”

Meanwhile, Justice’s own past is getting a fresh lease of life as an influence or a sample, as on “Fire Alarm,” where the Snow Strippers hijack gabber-fast jolts of electricity and horror-score dissonance from “Stress,” a deep cut from Cross. Justice doesn’t always clear sample requests, but they made an exception here. “There’s really an element of chaos and weirdness on the track that we liked,” says de Rosnay. Originally released in 2007, “Stress” itself plucked elements from multiple 1970s sources — freaky klaxons from the intro of a 1976 Devo short film, the baleful riff from a 1977 David Shire song (which is a disco version of Modest Mussorgsky's 1867 composition "Night on Bald Mountain"). Twitching across time, “Fire Alarm” and “Stress” form a crazed ouroboros of colliding and collapsing music history. “We’ve been sampling people, people are sampling us — it all makes sense,” says Augé. “The circle is round.”

Originally Appeared on GQ