All By Myself: Barry Can’t Swim on new album ‘Loner’ and dealing with fame

“Change” is the first word heard on Barry Can’t Swim’s new album, Loner. “There was nothing permanent but change,” a robotic voice says to open ‘The Person You’d Like to Be’. It’s an apt beginning for the new record from the Scottish musician, producer and DJ Joshua Mainnie. 

Since releasing debut album When Will We Land? via Ninja Tune in late 2023, he has shut down the Park Stage at Glastonbury, covered Rolling Stone UK’s Future of Music issue, sold out three Brixton Academy dates, been announced to top the bill at this summer’s All Points East and become the fastest-rising dance act in the UK. The digestion of such a turbulent period begins on Loner. 

Loner was written at home in stolen moments between legs of the When Will We Land? tour as his project steadily graduated to bigger venues and festival main stages. “As much as I love touring what I love more than anything is just writing music,” Mainnie tells Rolling Stone UK from Mexico City, where he’s continuing the seemingly never-ending tour. “Whenever I got the chance to get back into the studio, I just was so up for it that things just clicked quite quickly. I never really had the time to get into a rut of writing, because every time I had the chance to write, I was just buzzing to be doing it. It probably helped.” 

Even bigger stages await Barry Can’t Swim across 2025, and though he says the sonic change on the new album wasn’t engineered to perfectly fit the live shows, the beefed-up sound of Loner feels perfect for the vast festival fields and cavernous rooms he now inhabits. Pre-album singles ‘Still Riding’ and ‘Different’ bring a punchier and heavier sound to the front, even if the pandemonium they’ll surely create across summer 2025 is a happy coincidence. 

The one song that was written explicitly for a live show is the raucous, bubbling ‘About to Begin’. Mainnie had – he thought – finished the record at home in London, delivering it to his label. That very day, at his parents’ house in Edinburgh and without a project to write towards, he quickly made the track to “elevate” the live show and “make it bigger”. It eventually found a home on Loner too, and gives the record’s biggest propulsive thrust. 

As with most musicians making largely instrumental music, Mainnie puts a lot of stock into the titles of his songs as the main form of context they can give. Here, the song names show an artist changing, growing and pondering life’s big questions: ‘Different’; ‘Childhood’; ‘Marriage’. 

He says: “How you title your songs is a really great way to be able to signpost to people what they’re about. It’s very intentional and it’s very important. The process of making the album took a lot of self-reflection and introspection. Whenever that happens, obviously you do think about the big things.” 

While Loner sounds supremely confident and will be played on stage by a smiling and dancing producer, it was written from a place of conflict between Mainnie the man and Barry Can’t Swim the artist. 

“I think I isolated myself from those experiences,” he explains of the star-making tour he’s been on for the last 18 months. “I did it as a way to cope with it. Stepping onto a stage and having to do shows – it’s nerve wracking, man. The growth of it is quite scary and it’s a lot to process. I tried to create a little bit of a barrier to it in order for me to process it. I wasn’t enjoying it as much as I could have been, and it was only through writing the album and expressing those feelings that it came full circle and I realised how brilliant it is that I get to do that.” 

What people probably don’t realise, Mainnie says, is his shy and retiring nature as a person. The disconnect, he posits, comes from his off-the-wall artist moniker, his bubbly on-stage personality and the roof-raising house anthems he makes. “I like to take the piss, have a laugh and not take myself too seriously, but there’s an expectation that comes with that. I’m quite shy and it has been a lot for me to process that and be able to get on a stage and do that in front of people. It’s not something that has necessarily come so easy to me, especially at the speed that it has. It feels like it was just yesterday that I wasn’t even playing a live show. I thought the barrier that I created was probably helping me, but I actually realised it wasn’t.” 

During the tours, played to more rapturous and larger audiences every next month, it “was Barry” on stage, not Mainnie himself, he reflects. “Everything else, it was Josh.” The process of writing Loner, he says, has “helped me realise that those two are the same thing, and I don’t have to shy away from that. Now, when I step onto the stage, I’m Josh. I’m not Barry. That sounds so obvious, but it’s taken me a minute to realise that. It’s why I called the album Loner, because the process of making it was almost like therapy.” 

The upshot from these solitary sessions is then laid out, as if Barry is talking to Josh: “All you ever really need to do is not overthink it and just step it onto a stage and be yourself and write what you believe in. It’s such a privileged thing to get to do, so just go with it and enjoy it as much as you can. Don’t be so scared of it.” 

As he leaves to wind his way up the coast of North America, playing to ever more joyous and large audiences, Loner arrives as a signal of a new sense of peace and alchemy between the man and the artist.

Taken from the June/July issue of Rolling Stone UK, out now. Order your copy here.