At the Commodore Ballroom on Tuesday, March 25

Stage design usually only matters at arena shows, where the visual spectacle often makes just as big an impression on people as the music itself. Justice’s Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay may have been playing the Commodore on Tuesday, but the French neo-rave artists treated the gig like it was at G.M. Place, bringing an optical extravaganza that was more AC/DC than the Chemical Brothers. Framed on either side by 15-foot-high stacks of Marshall amps (merely props, these) and bisected by the band’s elegantly blasphemous logo (a giant glowing cross), the stage was an immense Gothic pulpit from which the Frenchmen delivered their deafening, wordless sermon.

Justice is at the forefront of the latest revival in populist dance music, and is arguably the biggest electronic outfit since the likes of Moby and Fatboy Slim. Augé and de Rosnay owe their success in large part to their relative unfamiliarity with the history of techno and house; because their first exposure to those genres came in the form of Daft Punk, they don’t have purist hang-ups about song content. Justice is a pop band first and foremost, and its buzzing, riff-driven tracks seem almost tailor-made for the era of iPods and ringtones.

On this night, Augé and de Rosnay presided over a Facebook convention of sorts, with bleeding-edge hipsters vastly outnumbered by the teeming masses who’ve come to the Justice party a few months late—a virtual eternity by today’s standards. With drinks in hand and fists raised, the Paris-based producers guided playback tracks with little intervention, occasionally tweaking the levels to let us know that they themselves weren’t just props. With only one album to their name, what the producers lack in catalogue depth they made up for with sheer loudness and the length of their songs, stretching and airing out hits like “Waters of Nazareth” and “Phantom” at volumes just north of blistering.

Where traditional synthesizer music is generally based on the idea that sounds should form and then fade away over time, making for a cycle of attack, decay, sustain, and release, Justice is all attack, all the time. Blinded by strobes, the crowd writhed blissfully under the assault, the songs of Augé and de Rosnay beating at them in thick, concussive waves until the clock struck midnight.

Coming on just after 9 p.m., Philadelphia’s Diplo performed gamely, sprinkling crowd-pleasers by M.I.A. and T.I. into his typical mix of improvised mashups and self-made remixes. Diplo’s a party-starter without parallel in the business, but when he spliced the vocal from the Beach Boys classic “God Only Knows” with a postmillennial breakbeat track, he inadvertently highlighted the stark differences of the two pieces and the musical eras they represent: the former is timeless, the latter nearly forgotten.