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15:09 · 2,095 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- Justice were two graphic designers before they were a band. Gaspard Auge and Xavier de Rosnay met at a Paris party in 2002, one a Metallica fan out of an experimental post-rock band, the other rooted in hip hop and pop.
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- Their break came from a loss. The remix of a Simian track they entered in a college radio contest lost, but it reached Pedro Winter, Daft Punk's manager and founder of Ed Banger, and they were signing a deal in his office a week later.
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- The lineage is precise: French touch, which Daft Punk built out of funk and disco samples into something smooth and nostalgic, then electro house, which diverged into a distorted, mechanical, aggressive sound.
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- Ed Banger's house style is the bridge, distorted synths and aggressive percussion with rock elements like electric guitar, and Waters of Nazareth is the most extreme case of it.
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- The cross began as a design accident. The organ sound and biblical title of the Waters of Nazareth EP led them to set a cross as the T in Justice, and a glowing cross lightbox at a launch party made the symbol permanent.
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- The debut sleeve came from wanting one pure image with no band name and no typography, and they titled the album with a crucifix character, which is why everyone settled on calling it Cross.
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- The religion was staging, not belief. De Rosnay compares the Pope on his balcony to the greatest rock star on earth, and says a mass and a party are the same shape, a crowd facing one direction, worshipping something that may or may not be worth it.
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- They were aiming at a disco opera, and reportedly sampled over 400 records with only a few credited. Most of the album is micro-sampling, single notes lifted from different records and reassembled into guitar, bass and string parts, which took months per track.
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- The reason it converted rock fans is that the reference points were rock. The duo name The Rapture and The White Stripes as their biggest records at the time, and say they aimed at garage rock partly because they had no technical ability in electronic production.
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- Blog house is the ecosystem that carried them, where an independently uploaded MP3 remix could outshine the original. The best proof is that MGMT's only Grammy win went to Justice for remixing Electric Feel, and the duo's heavier direction went on to shape Skrillex and American brostep.
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