Jul

The prolific and popular French rapper Jul represents an entirely new direction for French hip-hop. In a culture that has treasured ’90s boom-bap, he splices rap and club music into a danceable whole. Born into a working-class family in Marseille in 1990, Julien Mari started rapping at age 12. While composing his own songs, he rapped with local group Ghetto Phénomène, breaking out as a solo artist in 2014 with Dans ma paranoïa. That year, he released an astonishing three albums (all of which went gold or platinum) and kept up a frenetic pace. Perhaps most importantly, Jul is part of the generation of French rappers who looked to the Afrobeats scene for inspiration—and finding that French audiences were wholeheartedly on board with the sound. He’s worked with French African producers like DJ Babs, and several of his top songs, including 2016’s “Tchikita” (from L’ovni), are built around African instruments like the kora. He’s released several free albums—for his incarcerated fans, he says—and in order to exert more control over his sound and finances, he founded his own label, D’or et de Platine, in 2015. Following his three-album 2016, Jul continued at a sometimes slightly slower rate, releasing at least two full-length projects every year—although he returned to his yearly trio pattern several times—all while keeping his energetic, bouncy, club-friendly beats at the ready.