Justice
Smart Gallics
With their storming debut album, Justice are about to prove there’s life after mammoth crossover hits. With brutal noise, romantic melodies and a kids’ choir involved, it’s gonna be interesting…
Words_Chris Jones
As far back as cheese merchant Jean-Michel Jarre’s aural wallpaper in the 1970s, France has been synonymous with electronic music. The late 90s saw an explosion of interest off the back of the successes of Daft Punk and Air, as well as acts such as Cassius, Mirwais, Mr Oizo and the Daft Punk side-project Stardust. Since then, the torch has been carried by Vitalic and M83, but in the last couple of years a new scene based around the Parisian label Ed Banger label has emerged. First over the top were Justice, whose startlingly funky electro remix of English indie band Simian’s ‘Never Be Alone’ was picked up by the label and ended up ruling dancefloors everywhere last summer. All the while, the duo have made a serious name for themselves as remixers, with everyone from Death From Above 1979 and Franz Ferdinand to Britney Spears and N*E*R*D beating down their door for an electro-house makeover. And with potty-mouthed temptress Uffie and techno producer SebastiAn among those following in their wake, it looks like a new golden age of French electro could be afoot.
Strangely enough though for a band at the vanguard, Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé seem to have become accidental club heroes. “It’s kind of chance that we are now linked to the club scene – I don’t really come from a dance background,” the affable Parisian Gaspard admits. In fact the whole project was an accident in the first place, thanks to the now-ubiquitous ‘We Are Your Friends’. Gaspard explains.
“We met in 2003 and started doing music together for a competition which was a kind of parody of the Eurovision Song Contest - it was really bad. So then we downloaded the parts of ‘Never Be Alone’ for a college radio remix contest. At the time we didn’t even have a computer, we just had a sampler and a bad synthesiser. So we did it and lost the contest, but afterwards we met [Ed Banger boss] Pedro Winter and he decided to release it two weeks later.”
A lucky break then but the record didn’t exactly become an instant success. While it had been floating around since 2003, being championed by Erol Alkan and 2ManyDJs among others, it wasn’t until the track’s official UK release last year, accompanied by an MTV Europe Music Award-winning video, that things really started to take off.
“When we did it we weren’t thinking at all about dance music, we just wanted to create a pop song. It was amazing to see people were so interested in it. But at the same time it wasn’t an instant hit - it was four years ago.”
And so, after years of making their reputation on the underground, the time has come for Xavier and Gaspard to put their necks on the line with the release of a full-length, fully formed album. This is where you might say the lack of a true background in dance music comes in, for the record – simply entitled ‘†’ - comes over as a proper pop album and not a collection of lengthy dance tracks.
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