Barry Can’t Swim Has Already Achieved His Dreams — What Comes Next Is Less Obvious

They came in sailor hats, water wings and life preservers. 

But this was not a pool party, or a nautical supplies convention; instead, it was the second of three New York shows in April from Barry Can’t Swim. Some devotees honor the dance producer by sporting outfits that play off his name, even though the name started as a joke — a joke he insists is so boring that he refuses to repeat it. Barry Can’t Swim has won over fans with his laze-on-the-patio house music, though, meaning the quip lives on, generating more gags even as its origins are lost to time. 

Barry Can’t Swim is the project of Joshua Mainnie, a producer and DJ from Edinburgh, Scotland. He went into Covid relatively unknown, but emerged with a sizable audience streaming his productions, which delivers some of the thrills of house music — brisk tempos, predictable and pleasurable cycles of build-and-release — in tight little packages that also make them appealing to listeners who don’t frequent the genre. 

Mainnie has amassed more than 385 million official on-demand global streams through June 26, according to Luminate, plus a Mercury prize nomination for his debut album, 2023’s When Will We Land. His second full-length, Loner, is out tomorrow (July 11) through Ninja Tune. 

“I did my first live show around two years ago; it was a 400-cap in London,” Mainnie remembers. “At the time, we could barely even fit me in with the drummer.”

His audiences have since ballooned in the U.K. — in December, he sold out three nights at O2 Academy Brixton, which has a capacity of nearly 5,000 — and Stateside: During his recent swing through New York, he played a night at Terminal 5 (3,000 capacity) followed by a pair of shows at the 1,800-capacity Brooklyn Steel. These were followed by a pair of sold out shows in Los Angeles at the 6,300-capacity Shrine Auditorium in early May.

This rapid growth means that now Mainnie has plenty of room to dance on stage without crowding his percussionist — and enough extra space to add four string players. Meeting the morning after his last New York gig for an interview in the lobby of a snazzy Williamsburg hotel, Mainnie is tall and bright-eyed, shaggy and personable. As Mary Davenport, an A&R executive at the label Ninja Tune, which signed Barry Can’t Swim, puts it, “He oozes charm.” 

He’s also been musical since childhood. When Mainnie was nine, his grandfather got hold of an old piano that was being thrown out and “imposed it” on his parents. (The same grandfather appears on the cover of “Like the Old Days,” a soul-sampling cut that ranks among Barry Can’t Swim’s headiest productions.) Mainnie started to learn the instrument, cultivating an interest in ’60s garage rock and psychedelia. 

His introduction to electronic music came later, when he started listening to artists in the “Madchester” scene — groups like the Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses. “They were fusing what I’d always loved, ’60s music, with the new sound of electronic music,” he says.

Mainnie struggled to emulate this approach in his own band, though. “I was trying to move the drums to samples, and they were hesitant,” he remembers. “When you’re in a band, even if you’re writing the music, there are three or four other guys that you’ve got to convince if you want to do anything. None of them were really into it.” 

Producing on his own offered relief from whipping votes. Mainnie was in college, and he was also clubbing more — In Edinburgh, “all the good clubs are on this one strip called the Cowgate, and everyone kind of knew each other, it was always the same people pouring out into the street at the end of the night” — and becoming “obsessed with” lo-fi house acts like Seb Wildblood and Laurence Guy. (The latter is now a collaborator and a friend.) 

All this culminated in his first release as Barry Can’t Swim in December 2019: “Because I Wanted You to Know,” which tempers a chugging beat with placid, new-age keys and a trumpet that sounds like it’s wafting in from the park around the corner. “I had bigger tunes, but I wanted my first one to be almost like a palette-cleanser,” Mainnie says. “It was intentionally downtempo, very chill.”

The world shut down a few months later, but he kept releasing singles. For “Sunday at Glasto,” Mainnie juiced the bass line and added the kind of build-up that DJs can milk for maximum impact. The following year, he connected with Shall Not Fade — the Bristol-based dance label that has released music from other lo-fi producers like Guy, Mall Grab and DJ Boring — to put out the Amor Fati EP. Part loungey and part frolicking, it amassed millions of streams.

Emerging from lockdown, which he spent partially in Edinburgh and partially in London, was a shock for many, Mainnie included. “I found it hard to be around people, even people I knew really well,” he remembers. He had an additional layer of disorientation in the form of a fanbase “that just didn’t exist before.” And those followers wanted him to get out and DJ gigs. 

“Having to get behind decks when you’ve never DJ’d before and play venues — it was terrifying,” he says. “It was really a big jump.” 

It was more daunting because he had to learn the craft in a hurry. “To become a basic-level DJ that matches beats is relatively easy,” Mainnie says. “To be a good DJ is a very different thing. Selecting tunes, building sets, learning effects and good transitions, all that stuff takes time and practice.”

But he warmed to the work. And at the same time, his productions started to hook more listeners. 

When Will We Land? launched “How It Feels,” which is now the most popular Barry Can’t Swim song — pumping but wistful, like a bruiser who turns out to have a heart of gold. “Kimbara,” released in April 2024, samples one of the most famous salsa records of all time, trading in the intricate rhythms of Celia Cruz’s original “Quimbara” with Johnny Pacheco for the eternal comfort of four-on-the-floor. It was a top 20 single on Beatport’s house chart for most of May, June, and July last year.

Loner is not content to retrace the same path as its predecessor: “It’s diving into the weirder, more left-field Barry,” Davenport says. “Some listeners might be a little bit — not taken aback, that’s too strong a phrase, but it’s not the expected.”

The album opens with “The Person You’d Like to Be” — grungy and lumbering, it sounds like it might have played over the closing credits of a ’90s thriller. Next comes “Different,” which bundles a beat that nods to U.K. garage with police-siren synthesizers and a comically macho bass line. 

When Mainnie shared another pair of songs in May, he offered two more moods: One track “is for partying,” according to an Instagram post, while the other “is for crying to in the shower.” While he didn’t specify which is which, “About to Begin” is presumably the party tune, unless you like crying in the shower while listening to serrated acid house.

Performing at Brooklyn Steel in April, “About to Begin” was punctuated by searing sheets of green lasers that shot above the crowd, drawing oohs and ahs. (The song “makes me feel invincible,” one fan commented when Mainnie first shared the song on Instagram.) Those lasers were originally reserved for the end of the show, but he decided to use them earlier. His music director counseled that he might be “giving away too much too soon.” But “after he saw it,” Mainnie says, he was like, ‘fair play.’” 

As a solo act, Mainnie no longer has to persuade bandmates that his vision is the right one. (He does tour with musicians though — a ferocious live-drummer, a synth wizard and four string players to add “depth and richness and warmth.”) But as a successful producer performing at bigger shows and events that appeal to a crowd that may not know much about dance music — he’s got more than a dozen festivals lined up this summer, including Lollapalooza, Glastonbury and All Points East — he is now subject to a different kind of pressure. 

“If you’re doing these kinds of shows, you need bigger tunes,” Mainnie says. “I’ve only just gotten to that point — it’s only now that I’m starting to think like that a little bit.” This is a side effect of success that he’s trying to tamp down: “I don’t ever want to write with something in mind. I would rather just let it come to me.”

Back when Davenport first found a Barry Can’t Swim track trawling through Spotify and reached out, she asked Mainnie where he saw himself five years down the line. “He was like, ‘I want to headline [O2 Academy] Brixton,’” she says. “He’s obviously super ambitious.” 

With that goal now in the rear-view — accomplished well before the five-year mark— he’s more reticent to discuss his next objectives. He hopes to “make great music and enjoy a long career.”

But he does point to an interesting dichotomy in dance music: “A lot of artists that are getting good critical acclaim often don’t stream as well and vice versa — the ones that stream loads sometimes aren’t as respected,” Mainnie says. Maybe he can figure out a way to do both.