Modern Men

Four years have passed since Justice released ‘†’, their earth-shaking debut album, and yet it feels like a fraction of that amount of time. It says plenty about the pop cultural profile of Frenchmen Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé.

But then it’s not like Justice have been quiet. Eighteen months of touring was followed by a live DVD and documentary, before the duo indulged in a slew of side projects throughout 2009, including film scores and production work. It meant it was early last year that they finally sat down to work on what would become the brand new LP, ‘Audio, Video, Disco’.

“We started that in January 2010 and worked on it for a bit more than one year, and then, yeah, here we are!” de Rosnay laughs. “That was four years, but we just didn’t sit around – we were working on different things, and finally four years has passed, but it didn’t feel that long – it feels like six months. “We started when we had time to start working on it. That’s about it. It’s just that we didn’t have time to work on it before.”

‘Audio, Video, Disco’ is a clearly an evolution on ‘†’. There’s a lighter tone, and the album overflows with flashes of ‘70s prog and ‘80s arena rock. It doesn’t feel fussed over, and yet the 12 tracks on the album were all de Rosnay and Augé wrote. Not for them a surfeit of tunes and laborious process of elimination. It makes you suspect life is hard in the studio, but that’s something de Rosnay denies. “No, it was really easy to make,” he says. “We take a long time just because we are slow at making things – it was pretty smooth and fluid. When we make an album with 11 tracks on it, we make 11 tracks. We did the same thing for the first album. We don’t make spare songs. For this album we decided we’d make 12 songs, so we made 12 songs. It’s as simple as that.

“The [studio and the live arena] are two different things, but we adjust to going from one to the other. It’s not like you live two different lives when you’re on tour and when you’re in the studio, and our brains are still able to develop from one to the other quite smoothly. It’s fine. At the end these are just two quite easy jobs, and it doesn’t require too many skills to go from one to the other.”

Listening to the album, you’d think de Rosnay and Augé spent a large amount of time learning new instruments. ‘Audio, Video, Disco’s a remarkably analogue and organic sounding album, leaning heavily towards Justice’s rockier tendencies. But their studio setup is remarkably simple, ultimately boiling down to four keyboards and one guitar.

“It was a minimal setup. The thing is that we both know how to play keyboards and guitar, but we’re not instrumentalists. We’re not amazing players, but we know just enough to write and record the songs, and that’s enough for us. That’s why we didn’t need to take on session musicians. For our music I think it’s better when we do everything ourselves, even if it takes a bit longer. It’s not a big deal and what we play is pretty simple … We want to stay like this – I think it’s good that we don’t know too much about it. It doesn’t make it harder; it makes it a bit longer sometimes. All we know is what we do.”

It makes you wonder if Justice – that musical connection between de Rosnay and Augé – could have flourished in a past era, one away from the digital environment of today. “No, that’s the thing: we make music the way it sounds. The way we write these songs is very 2011, if you know what I mean. Of course, I think that 30 years ago we wouldn’t have been musicians, because 30 years ago when you needed to make an album, you would have first had to have a lot of money, because you would have needed studio musicians, a producer, an engineer, a mixer and all of that. You needed to know how to operate things – it wasn’t like you just pressed record and let it play. All those things we don’t know how to do, and what is good is that now you can be all of these things. As Justice, we are the musicians, the performers, the composers, the engineers, the editors, just everything. That’s only possible with computers, and for this reason only. What we do is very modern and we make it in a modern way.”

Still, for all the work in the studio, Justice are perhaps best known for their enthralling live shows. It’s hard not to think of a new album as just some fresh grist for the next time de Rosnay and Augé take over a club or festival. Excitement always surrounds the debut of a new Justice live set and this year Australia’s lucky enough to host the big event, the duo headlining Summafieldayze. “Yeah, we’re very excited,” de Rosnay says. “This is why we decided to kick off the new live show in Australia. It’s a nice place to start the tour. It will be summer time, and the country’s pretty welcoming, and we have a good following in Australia, so when we had this proposal to start the tour there, we thought why not?

“It would not make sense if I try to talk about it. The thing is, I don’t really know what to say. I can’t tell you if it’s going to be great or whatever, because I don’t know yet. Of course we hope and think it’s going to be good, and we’ve put all of our efforts into making it special. But then only when we make it will we see. But there’s no point in saying, ‘Yeaaaah, it’s gonna be great!’ I don’t know,” he laughs. “Maybe it won’t.”

De Rosnay can at least allow himself to get excited about playing the new songs live. Justice think of albums and live shows as having two different purposes, and the preparation of the songs is vastly different. “The music we make for live shows just gives a very different aspect to the tracks. Some of the tracks that are on the album wouldn’t work on the live show as they are, and vice versa, some of the tracks that we play for the live show wouldn’t work on the album. So we just make things in a slightly different way. It’s fun to be working on it right now, and it’s fun to see how the songs on the new album take the songs on the first album into another dimension. They’re blending together well, which is great.”

Justice headline Summafieldayze at the Spit on the Gold Coast January 2. summafieldayze.com

Q&A interview originally conducted for TheVine.com.au