​Welcome to Hyperdrama: Justice’s cinematic venture into a brand new world

It’s over 15 years now since their era-defining debut album was released. The record not only catapulted the French duo into the limelight as figureheads of an electro-tinged, rock-infused era of dance music, but heralded the winds of change for more electronic music artists breaking through as main-stage headliners. In the same year as Daft Punk’s legendary 2006 show at Coachella, Justice were being tipped as the next in line. The success of ‘Cross’ the following year was unequivocal: the leaders of a new wave of electronic stars had arrived.

“To us ‘Cross’ is still a mystery and almost an anomaly,” reminisces De Rosnay. “It’s a great example of approaching things, devoid of any knowledge or preconception about anything. We made this album, our first album and we had never produced, recorded or mixed an album before. We made it not knowing anything.

“In a lot of ways, this record [‘Cross’] doesn’t sound good. In pure sonics it doesn’t sound good. Any sound engineer will tell you that it sounds awful and at the same time it sounds great.”

By this point, anomalies are out of the question, everything the duo have released since that album has been clinical and well-received. Nothing showcases this upward trajectory better than the list of collaborators on ‘Hyperdrama’, with Justice’s ability to conjure the biggest names in the world with ease evident to see.

Tame Impala, Thundercat, Miguel and Connan Mockasin appear alongside newer acts like The Flints and Rimon, all contributing to the widest range of additional acts that any Justice album has put forward.

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Talking about the acts included De Rosnay explains that “they all have their own profiles and the process was always driven by music and never because ‘oh this guy is famous, maybe we can do some cross-audience’ type of thing.”

The Tame Impala collab feels like the perfect marriage of both act’s sounds and the two tracks, majestic album opener ‘Neverender’ and ‘One Night/All Night’ are two of the LP’s disco-soaked, electronic highlights.

“The funny thing about Kevin Parker is that when we first had the very early batch of demos, we could tell he was more attracted to the tougher stuff, which makes sense as it’s further away from what he’s doing,” says Auge.

“We can’t talk on his behalf but we really felt that for him working with us, he was looking for opportunities to move away from doing what he knows how to do, and for us that’s also a good sign,” adds De Rosnay

“If you take all of those people like Thundercat, Miguel, Connan, they are all people who really try to challenge their music. Thundercat for example has one foot in very difficult jazz music. If you go to his shows, it’s very challenging and at the same time he perfectly masters this soul, almost yacht rock type of music,” he continues

“Kevin can do pop music, psychedelic rock, sometimes even dance music. So yeah they’re all people we feel are very curious and always up for challenging themselves to do something else. Miguel is the same, he’s been doing grunge, R&B, industrial rap, even singing lines from Rod Stewart on A$AP Rocky songs, so they are all very versatile, they are not one trick ponies and that’s very refreshing.”