Barry Can’t Swim, the pseudonym for Scottish producer and DJ Joshua Mainnie, has been named as one of the breakout names on the BBC’s Sound of 2025 list. With his colourful and woozy grooves, Mainnie has won over packed crowds from Glastonbury to Coachella and received Brit Award and Mercury Prize nominations in 2024. This achievement confirms him as one of the new superstars of dance music, gaining more fans, exposure, and acclaim with each release, elevating his six-year steady climb to new heights.
When Barry Can’t Swim released his first single in December 2019, it was one of Mainnie’s many projects as a musician from Edinburgh. Still, the tune became a hit, and Mainnie – who had no prior experience as a DJ – began performing. Mainnie said his early inspiration came from bands such as the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses, who integrated indie and dance in the Madchester scene of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Following his discovery of the clubs around Edinburgh’s Cowgate, where he discovered and fell in love with electronic music, Mainnie focused his career on dance music.
Barry Can’t Swim’s sound is bright, euphoric, and highly danceable, featuring hazy house rhythms, trance pianos, and infectious vocal snippets that blend to create intoxicating shots of sonic sunshine. The music consists of a mix of styles such as Galician folk, Brazilian funk, and traditional songwriting and melody of 60s music with electronic production. The musicians who are “making leftfield electronic music definitely feel that it has a larger audience than ever before,” according to Mainnie. Alongside the likes of Sound of 2023 runner-up Fred Again, Sound of 2024 listee Peggy Gou and Sound of 2025 nominees Confidence Man, Barry Can’t Swim is among a new wave of intelligently euphoric dance music heroes.
Barry Can’t Swim, whose debut album When Will We Land? reached Number 12 on the UK chart in November, sold out three nights at Brixton Academy and will headline a night of the All Points East Festival in east London in August. Mainnie, who dances behind his keyboard in colourful shirts, says he enjoys doing DJ sets but doesn’t like being referred to as a DJ. His passion for both playing live and DJ-ing informs his writing, and he believes that his music lends itself well to live performance of electronic music
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