story by Justine Reisinger

The lights are off and the noise amongst the crowd is building. The chatter registers just below a dull roar as Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay take the stage, Augé with a cigarette dangling from his lips. The two are framed between twin stacks of giant Marshall amps, set three by three. Without much visibility, the outline of a giant cross cuts the stage in half, attached to a table stacked with electronic goodies and laptops. The duo, better known as French electro-dance outfit Justice, already have the crowd wrapped around their fingers…before even playing a note.

It's 3:30 a.m. and their set is about to begin at the Flanders Expo Center in Gent, Belgium for the aptly named I Love Techno Festival. Countless crowds across the globe have experienced this intro by now. A low noise rumbles throughout the room as faint bells echo. Dozens of cell phones swing open in the air and digital cameras switch on, ready to capture what comes next. The united clapping gets cut off by the sudden illumination of the aforementioned giant cross, bathing the crowd in white light as Justice kicks off with "Genesis." The song slowly builds as the cross hits varying degrees of blinding brightness until Augé punches his fist in the air, like a charismatic preacher calling for a jubilant "Amen!"

Mass has begun.

"Our main idea was to try to turn a club into a church at some point...to devote to a style between church music and electronic music," Augé explains to Chicago Innerview from Paris, having recently returned from a 10-day tour of the U.K. "It's the same process of having thousands of people looking in the same direction and to be able to gather so many people focused on one point."

To say that 2007 was a good year for Justice would be an understatement of biblical proportions. The momentum they've been building since their first single "Never Be Alone" (later re-released as "We Are Your Friends") in 2003 finally apexed this past June with the release of their much hyped debut full-length, Cross. The duo was signed to Ed Banger Records by label boss Pedro Winter, who until the recent success of Justice and label mates SebastiAn, Uffie and others, was best known for managing Daft Punk.

Comparisons to the most popular and widely received French DJ duo of all time surface frequently, as does speculation that Justice will take the throne as "the next Daft Punk." Augé and de Rosnay, however, aren’t buying it. "It's always been simple for us because we are not trying to create a music revolution. We never thought about being the 'new scene'," Augé says. "We don't have that much ambition."

The duo got their break by entering and losing a remix contest for Simian's track "Never Be Alone." Winter signed Justice after hearing the single, which was the second song they ever created. By November 2006 the track's music video beat out Kanye West's "Touch the Sky" in the "Best Video" category at the MTV European Music Awards…with notably disastrous yet hilarious results. West rushed the stage, bitching that his video "cost a million dollars, Pamela Anderson was in it, I was jumping across canyons and shit! If I don't win, the awards show loses credibility."

The unintentional PR brought more attention for Justice, who'd already been packing dance floors across Europe with the basic sing-a-long ("We are your friends / You'll never be alone again / Well come on" and repeat). Only having released one other single, "Waters of Nazareth," and a handful of remixes of artists ranging from Britney Spears to Metallica, Justice was already named "Best Artist of 2006" by XLR8R magazine. Justice spent a year in the studio working on Cross, unveiling the new material for their first-ever live set (sans turntables) at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in April 2006. "The U.S. is a very tough market to break through for French people like us, so it was really amazing that people were into [our music on the first U.S. tour]. Especially so at Coachella because it was the first time people were listening to new tracks off the album," Augé reminisces. "The response to that was really touching. It was a really huge relief for us that we hadn't done all that work for nothing."

And Justice hasn't stopped since. The duo spent the last year touring and won't be wrapping up until this November, thanks to the hellishly hot reception of Cross. While critics of the Ricardo Villalobos or Ellen Allien persuasion find Justice immature music for teens made in poor taste, the duo sees their music as poppy and efficient. "The main concern of a Justice track is to touch someone in a very simple way, very innate emotions. We are always trying to make the listener sad or melancholic, or just make them want to dance," Augé says. "It's also why we're unable to do very long tracks because we always get bored after four minutes, which is why we are always trying to keep a very pop format."

Tracks like "Stress" and "Valentine" fit the bill. "Stress" could be played in the background of a slasher film while "Valentine" features sweet and sentimental piano, slow and precise…perfect for flirtatious gazes across a candlelit dinner table. The album's first single, "D.A.N.C.E.", features a children's choir from London sweetly telling the listener to do just that. Augé and de Rosnay, instead of using a sample, wrote the lyrics for the choir to sing. While many DJs use samples frequently, Justice only uses a few loops on three songs. "The rest is all homemade," Augé says.

Creatively, de Rosnay and Augé share the same vision for music. Born and bred in Paris on MTV, pop music and Snoop Dogg, the two grew apart in taste as they aged. De Rosnay listened to more French music while Augé preferred "weird electronic shit", as he puts it. "Even though we prefer different things, in the end we are meeting on everything together," Augé says. Currently the two are listening to French disco, '80s pop music, Billy Joel and Steely Dan.

Their love for pop music partially inspired the Christian iconography in their work and stage setup. "For Madonna and George Michael the cross was a big pop symbol of the '90s," Augé says. "It's funny because some people think we actually are some Christian electronic band and that's why we use the cross." Last year some American Christian groups went so far as to thank the band for "spreading the word." One can't be blamed for getting their messages crossed when stage props include a giant cross, song titles include "Genesis," "Let There Be Light," and "Waters of Nazareth," and the name of their album is simply the icon of a cross.

And live, the neon cross flashes with the music. "We didn't want to use big visuals, so we only use one color of light. Just white light and black out to make it more efficient in the rock sense of the word," says Augé. For live shows, the pair wanted to shy away from the hi-tech, hi-fi oriented stage presentation that one commonly finds with other electronic acts. "It's something we were fed up with. Some electronic acts have already done it very well [Daft Punk pyramids, anyone?], so it was natural for us to go in the other direction," Augé says. Justice shows, instead, veer more towards the direction of '70s and '80s rock shows: a blend between Spinal Tap and Brian de Palma's 1974 glam-rock horror musical Phantom of the Paradise.

Plans for a follow-up album are still quite distant thanks to Justice's busy tour schedule for the next seven months. For now, the duo just plans on riding the wave while it lasts. "It's definitely the best way of life we could ever have hoped for, only good fun," Augé says. "Everything has been growing slowly…we are just trying to make it last as long as we can."

Justice :: with Diplo and Fancy :: Riviera :: March 20.