Eye-catching grid pattern, all those black squares connected in geometric patterns. I was hoping the sideways Ts would relate to a few entries somehow — ah well.
Nice grid-spanners in IM WAY AHEAD OF YOU and LIMOUSINE DRIVER, with its great clue, [One with a long stretch to go?]. Took me a while to realize that "stretch" was slang for "limo."

Some other colorful long answers, too: THE PIANO, FREEMIUM, and PAY AS YOU GO not far away. Nice duo, those last two!
It can be tough for single-word entries to shine (OVERLOUD, I'm looking at you), but I loved GENDARME. The clue tying it to "Les Miserables" puts it over the top for me, making me reminisce about all those crazy emotions I had when I first saw the musical. Great stuff.
Fun to have a French mini-theme, too, what with DÉTENTE, ROTISSERIE, and LE MONDE, all nice answers. And how cool that LEMONDE and LEMONADE are so similar! I sense a crossword theme in there somewhere …
Ah, if it hadn't been for the odd SMIT. NEET, REG, ANON, and ERNO (Rubik) feel pretty minor to me, and ONE NO is something I read about nearly every day in my beloved Bridge Bulletin. Okay, I admit that the last one is iffy (and that I wish we were back in the day when bridge was America's most popular game. sigh). SOR is … the Soroptimists? Took me almost ten search queries to figure that out. (Whoops, it's short for "sorority." Thanks to Nancy Shack and Dave Glasser for pointing this out!)
My first impression after solving was that there wasn't that much crossword glue, but when I count it up, it's a pretty high number. Julian does well to spread everything around, never concentrating too much in one spot, which helped to camouflage it all.
It'd have been nice to get more grid flow — that diagonal line tends to split the grid in half — but entries connecting the halves were pretty easy to get. And I liked how the grid presented so much great long material in concentration. To kick off the puzzle with STRAWMAN, THE PIANO, IM WAY AHEAD OF YOU, TOSS A COIN blaring like headlines was a neat effect.