As they prepare to kick off their North American tour, French duo Justice - Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay - have been discussing their approach to music making - specifically in relation to 2024 album, Hyperdrama - and explaining why they no longer sample other people’ records.
Asked by Rolling Stone if this is about having more control over their sound, de Rosnay replied: “100%. Sampling the traditional way gets frustrating fast: bad tuning, rigid tempos, weird textures that don’t bend. So we started recording our own source material – built for flexibility. It saves us 900 hours digging through crates.”
We can certainly see the benefits - no royalty payments to be made to other artists, for a start - but de Rosnay also admits that there are downsides: “No more surprises. No more accidents. That spark of stumbling on a forgotten gem… gone,” he says. “Daft Punk were the kings of that. They could turn half a second of groove into a global anthem.”
But it wasn’t just sampling that Justice shunned on Hyperdrama - de Rosnay says that they wanted to take a completely different creative approach to previous projects.
“From the jump, we wanted to unlearn what we knew,” he says. “Break the usual habits. Skip the expected resolution. What happens if you strip everything away – and let something else explode?”
Some things did stay the same, though: “We build around loops. Always,” says de Rosnay. “Then we stretch, bend, push – until something new cracks through. That one bass note, dropped three minutes in, that rewires the whole track; that’s our sweet spot.”
Another aim on Hyperdrama was to make it difficult for fans to spot its various sonic ingredients. “We didn’t want listeners thinking, ‘Oh, that’s a Moog bass, that’s a Juno pad,’” says de Rosnay. “The goal was fusion. No instruments, no stems – just one dense block of sound. Organic and synthetic, indistinguishable. Samples and live playing, melted together. Even what sounds ‘natural’ is often heavily processed.”
Of course, ‘heavy processing’ is part and parcel of a lot of electronic music making, but what about taking things a step further and letting AI do some of the creative legwork. While de Rosnay admits he finds it “intriguing” at this point, Augé argues that some kind of rubicon has already been crossed.
“Humans choose convenience,” he argues. “There won’t be a mass awakening like, ‘Wait! It was made by AI? I refuse to listen.’ We’ve already crossed that line. Some K-pop bands are fully generated – face, voice, video – and they’re killing it. But I do hope it sparks a punk backlash. A real DIY return.”
“That’s how it usually plays out,” reckons de Rosnay. “AI reminds me of frozen food in the ‘80s. People were amazed – ‘Just add water, voilà: powdered bolognese!’ Then came the moment: ‘Wait a minute … what if we actually cooked again?’”
Tour dates and ticket details are available on the Justice website.
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