2019, Los Angeles. On the star-studded stage of the Grammy Awards, Justice wins the award for best electronic music album with Woman Worldwide, a powerful live sum built up over a marathon of shows from one end of the world to the other. It was a crowning achievement, the culmination of a cycle that began three years earlier with the release of Woman, the French duo’s third album. “There was something symbolic about this award. It was like a sign that we could embark on something new,” says Xavier de Rosnay today. 

As if by reflex, he and his long-time partner Gaspard Augé soon found themselves in a house tucked away somewhere in Paris, which served both as a studio and as a refuge for their friendship. For months, following a rhythm that naturally allows time for inspiration to infuse, and which is only disrupted by the appearance of Covid, they work step by step on the body of a new album, HYPERDRAMA. 

As always, it’s a question of confronting a challenge, of establishing the principles of an experiment in the unknown. We always want to take our music to places we’ve never been before,” explains Gaspard Augé. It’s a necessity to create a form of emulation between us and also to have fun.” By marrying the sounds of their old machines with the infinite possibilities of digital techniques, they imagine suites of melodies as extraordinary sonic magmas that seem impossible to dissect instrument by instrument. This unprecedented material is divided into two distinct genres. 

On the one hand, the dreamy disco flights, a delicate, melancholy soundtrack under an immense sky. “We’ve always wanted to create our own sampler tracks, something close to the idea of the magic loop and filtered disco, but with control over each of the elements that make up that loop,” says the Justice pair. On the other, the radical aesthetics of gabber and hardcore techno used as sound material. “These are genres we like to play in our sets, pure and radical,” note Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé. 

On HYPERDRAMA, one atmosphere suddenly follows another, track after track – the furious tone of “Generator” followed immediately by the rave accents of “One Night/All Night” – when everything isn’t tangled up like a bunch of nerves on “Incognito”. There’s the idea of a constant transition from shadow to light. “It’s as if we had a little button on our console to switch from one sonic universe to another. But it’s still the same music lit differently”, Gaspard Augé points out.

For the first time since Justice made its mark on the global electronic music scene in 2007 with the now-legendary †, the duo opens up to collaborations on this release, from Kevin Parker to Miguel via Connan Mockasin and Thundercat to the discovery of The Flints, a pair of gifted twins and Rimon, a crush unearthed in the Netherlands by Pedro Winter. “These artists are a reflection of what we love about music today. They are autonomous artists, who write, compose and often produce their music themselves. Most of them have always been in the back of our minds,” says Xavier de Rosnay. Justice’s fourth album is an invitation to get caught up in a world that’s even richer than Fantasia. A world conceived as an augmented version of the human soul, where joy, anger, sadness and everything else unfolds in its most shattering and heartfelt intensity. A sum total of feelings that make up this HYPERDRAMA, which we’d like to imagine generated by an unidentified intelligence and through which we’d travel aboard a “mechanico-organic vessel”, according to Gaspard Augé.