Before bishops and martyrs, the cross-shaped icon already had its place in the ancient world. The Egyptians used the ankh to symbolize life; across Bronze Age Europe, sun-crosses mapped a four-part world; centuries later, printers dropped the dagger (†) into footnotes and railroads nailed crossbucks to warn the wandering. Proof that form pulls our focus long before doctrine; a cross is only an axis until someone inks a myth across it—and only then do cultures hang their stories and call it belief. The power of myth has a way of crowning kings, excusing greed, and rationalizing violence. But it can also bring people together.

Two French kids, bathed in a cloud of cigarette and clove smoke, understood that power. Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé met in the early 2000s comparing sleeves and type more than synth patches —Xavier fresh from typography studies, Gaspard moonlighting as a poster artist. Their first foray into music carried those graphic sensibilities forward: a tongue-in-cheek compilation that led to a Paris college-radio remix contest. Their take on Simian’s “Never Be Alone” didn’t win, but it rocketed through blogs and clubs, landed on Busy P’s radar, and eventually reemerged as “We Are Your Friends.” Nearly two decades on, it’s still the anthem for those who spent Friday nights at Cinespace—chain-smoking, wearing purple American Apparel tees with a Han Solo vest from Buffalo Exchange, and making out with a stranger in the corner without the fear of contracting a once-in-a-generation infectious disease.

That graphic sensibility behind their Simian rework carried straight into an accompanying visual vocabulary. The artist So-Me extended the graphic thesis. For “Waters of Nazareth,” de Rosnay and Augé’s caustic first single (a scorched-earth hymn that sounds like a cathedral organ shoved through the wood chipper at the end of Fargo), he rotated a cruciform, swapped the T in JUS†ICE, and turned the world’s most recognizable symbol into a logo you could read from the nosebleeds. With that, Justice was formed—designers making dance music that hits like heavy metal and inspires like liturgy. Their biblical first album, aptly titled (wait for it) Cross, was more than strong brand marketing; it was a pact between the speaker and the audience—a promise that when it lights up, you are absolved of your sins.

Borrow the world’s most recognizable symbol and the music has to answer with the same subversive charge. They arrived as EDM ballooned into a catch-all, blogs and RSS rips blasting tracks into festivals and radio at hyperspace. In that rush, they were shelved next to big-name DJs who graced the marquees on the Las Vegas Strip—breezy summer acts at best; at worst, the kind with a more colorful name I’m too polite to type (whatever, I’ll say it—it’s “cheese dick”). DJs in that lane are often accused of splicing presets in Ableton’s Session View, and the assumption sticks to anyone using a USB as an instrument. Same rooms, ostensibly the same audience—but Justice were building with a different method and purpose.

Their process begins with composition: chords and countermelodies, then reconstruction. Parts are recast with microsamples—single notes lifted from hundreds of records, arranged until they behave like one instrument. Take their biggest hit, “D.A.N.C.E.”: half playground chant and half disco catechism, with a kids’ choir, nods to the King of Pop, and rainbow strings. Yet, under the gloss, the “guitar” is a single sampled pluck, the bass a collage of chops, the strings rebuilt note by note from bargain-bin records. Elsewhere, “Genesis” folds a repitched monster-movie motif into a constant dread; “Newjack” frankensteins Brothers Johnson into bright, chopped motion; a tiny chime from some long-retired Apple bundle stitches the seams. Justice’s palette reads more like the taste of a conservatory-trained crate-digger than a Vegas headliner at Tao Beach: baroque counterpoint, disco violins, anime-theme bravado, heavy compression, and drum punch carved from negative space. Built like this, the catalog behaves less like a stack of singles and more like a modular system, with phrases designed to snap together when the room demands it.

That room was the Kia Forum on Saturday, October 25, where Justice’s Hyperdrama tour made its mark. Over the years, their stagecraft has kept evolving while speaking the same language: first a blazing cross towering over a forest of Marshall stacks, then electric-powered cathedral pipes, and now an alien lattice of moving light, with the cross still at the center. Though the set design has changed, the impact remains the same. “Genesis” opens like a summons—trumpets announcing the four horsemen—and before the trials and tribulations begin, it tilts into a feral “Phantom,” then crescendos into the first shard of “Generator.” At the “Generator” drop, white beams cut through the rafters, the cross withholds the collective pulse, and the arena detonates. Lighting director Vincent Lérisson (spiritually the third member of Justice) rides the rig in real time like a War Boy—no dead-eyed timecode, hands on faders, landing strobes like verbs and using mirrors for call-and-response. He saves the full blaze of the cross for the moments that matter so the icon never dulls.

By the set’s midpoint, the catalog stops announcing arrivals to shift into another gear. “D.A.N.C.E.” no longer stands alone; it blends into “Safe and Sound,” then steps into “Neverender,” the Tame Impala collaboration so natural it triggers a little Berenstain Bears moment: was Kevin Parker always part of Justice? Both Tame Impala collabs were the night’s loudest singalongs, met with rapturous approval (curious, given how loudly the internet has been criticizing Deadbeat this month, but that’s a review for another time). “Stress” arrives as their heavy-metal thesis in LEDs—red strobes, clenched jaws—and when they accelerate into “Audio, Video, Disco,” you can feel shoulders drop across the arena like the last gasp before a deep plunge.

The home stretch braids their lore into an earned catharsis. “Phantom Pt. II” becomes a hinge; “Waters of Nazareth” grinds its cathedral gears; “We Are Your Friends” flickers like an origin sigil. Hooks pile until meaning shifts at the seam. The MSTRKRFT remix of “D.A.N.C.E.” locks the room to a heavy pulse, then Jay-Z’s “On to the Next One”—fittingly built on a “D.A.N.C.E.” sample—cuts in (“Freeze! Somebody bring me back some money, please”), and the joy is half surprise and half recognition. For ninety minutes, Justice performs as if it’s one long track; if you’ve never heard them before, you could believe it was written that way. If you have, you catch the reflexive callbacks—old souls in new clothes.

Sharing the bill with Kaytranada sharpened the contrast without turning it into a competition. On paper, the pairing felt odd when it was announced—the cynical corners of the internet wondered if they couldn’t sell out arenas alone, or if everyone had already seen Hyperdrama live by now (for the record, this was my fifth—so probably). In the room, though, it read as deliberate mutual respect. Two dialects of dance music set side by side: Kaytranada’s cloud city of green-tinted groove and Justice’s cathedral of voltage turned up to 11—inviting two different fan bases to stand under the same canopy. His set pulled a visibly younger congregation in their Saturday best. Some peeled off early when Kaytranada finished his set to find the afters; those who stayed did not regret it. A college kid behind me, pupils dilated as the cross lit up the arena, said it succinctly: “I don’t know what this is, but I love it.”

Symbols traverse centuries, and as they pass through various hands—some wrong, some right—they can harden into cudgels. Imagery meant for virtue or aspiration curdles into instruments of control. In Justice’s hands, the cross drew charges of sacrilege. Yet the mark reasserted itself as a convening signal. It is the same instinct that stitches hundreds of single notes into one instrument, pulling thousands of strangers into one measure. A modern day liturgy of voltage, patience, and handwork. For two decades, that work has turned archive to anthem and rigor to spectacle. On this night, it made one body of 17,000 within sight of that epochal axis—from Egyptian ankhs to Renaissance woodcuts to the stories we hang on the one some texts call “I AM”—and still they make it feel present tense. Whatever blasphemy some tried to see misses the simple pact offered by the cross—not a right so much as a rite, old songs made new in the mouths of strangers who didn’t know they were a choir until the last chord hung in the air.