Juls has spent much of his career following music across borders. Born in London to Ghanaian parents and shaped by time spent between Britain and Ghana, his musical education was expansive from the beginning. Growing up, he was exposed to Jazz, Reggae and Highlife, while his mother’s love of African music helped shape his connection to Ghanaian sounds. His relationship with Reggae began early through her love of Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley while Dancehall entered his world later during his university years. Over time, those influences stopped feeling like separate reference points. They became part of the same musical vocabulary.

Across projects like ‘Sounds of My World’ and ‘Peace and Love,’ Juls has continually looked outward with a goal of connecting Ghanaian music with sounds from across the Black diaspora. Jamaica has held a particular pull both as a musical influence and a place he has returned to repeatedly with family and for work.

‘Junction,’ his recent collaborative album with Jamaican artist Projexx, brings that relationship into focus. The project began during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Juls was introduced to Projexx through his manager. The two artists began exchanging ideas remotely. A friendship followed and eventually the music became too consistent to remain a collection of loose collaborations. “We just kept creating,” Juls tells NATIVE Mag. “And our chemistry is just undeniable.’”

The decision to make an album together was almost as simple as the chemistry that preceded it. They had been talking about it for years before. During one of Juls’ trips to Jamaica, he finally suggested they stop talking and make the project. There was no elaborate strategy behind it. What emerged was ‘Junction,’ a project built around the long history between Ghana and Jamaica. Juls has travelled to Jamaica with his family and says the familiarity of the Caribbean country has always felt striking. “Anybody who knows me closely knows that if you come in my car, that’s what I’m playing most of the time,” he says.

The similarities run deeper than music. Ghana and Jamaica share histories shaped by the Trans-atlantic slave trade and their cultural relationship can be heard in rhythms, language, food and the ways people carry themselves. Juls is interested in those continuities but he is equally conscious of the distance and history that separate them. ‘Junction’ became an attempt to bring those worlds together without flattening either one. “We thought, ‘Yeah, let’s just make a project that blends our cultures together,’” he points out..

The title came from Projexx. A junction is a meeting point, and that is essentially what the album represents: two musical paths arriving at the same place. The project does not try to force a new identity onto either culture. Instead, it lets their existing similarities guide the music. For much of the album’s creation, that meeting happened remotely. When Juls and Projexx eventually spent more time together in Jamaica, the process took on an intimate feel. They recorded at Projexx’s house, calling it “our studio”, and spent enough time together for the friendship behind the music to become part of the work itself. “We spent a lot of time with each other,” Juls says. “I got to enjoy the process of making the music, which I usually don’t.”

That sense of ease also shaped the album’s guest appearances. BOJ, Tay Iwar, Pa Salieu, Valiant and the other collaborators came into the project through existing relationships and creative instincts rather than a predetermined list. Juls has always treated collaboration as an extension of human connection. “It’s not about everybody in the room just making music,” he says. “It’s about building a relationship.”

Three years also gave ‘Junction’ enough time to become something different from what it was initially imagined to be. Much of the early material was eventually discarded, with only a couple of songs from those first years remaining on the final album. The rest was made more recently, as Juls and Projexx found a clearer understanding of what the project needed.That clarity was not always immediate. Combining Ghanaian and Jamaican influences meant finding a balance between familiarity and difference particularly when working with sounds that carry such distinct histories. “I had to fuse the sounds in a way where it was respectable for both cultures,” Juls says.

One of the records that came out of that uncertainty is “Time and Place,” a Reggae-influenced love song featuring Haile. It is the track Juls feels most personally attached to, partly because it gave him the chance to make a kind of record he had wanted to explore for years. “I’ve always wanted to make a song like that,” he says. “So that’s one that’s special to me.”Beyond the album, the journey continues with a documentary planned for October alongside the deluxe. It will give the relationship between Ghana and Jamaica another form, extending the story beyond the music and into the places that inspired it.

For Juls, though, ‘Junction’ is also evidence of where his own curiosity has taken him. His career has been built on movement between sounds, scenes and cultures, and this time the distance he is crossing is both literal and historical. He is not attempting to explain the connection between Ghana and Jamaica so much as listen for it. “There’s a lot that can be built between the two countries,” he says. “Anybody would be surprised at how similar they are: culturally, food-wise, even in the way they speak.It’s literally the same place. It’s just divided by the Atlantic Ocean.”

Listen to ‘Junction’ here.