Barry Can’t Swim’s introduction to clubbing is a familiar tale for Edinburgh’s ravers. At least three times a week, the producer-in-waiting was roaming Cowgate, frequenting its notorious diminutive sweatbox (‘I was exclusively at Sneaky Pete’s, pretty much’) or heading across the road to The Bongo Club. ‘Nick [Skillis] ran a night called Headset,’ he recalls. ‘My mate would often DJ at it, playing garage and that sort of stuff.’ 

When prompted on how the club floor felt in those fledgling days, Edinburgh’s small-town flavour shines through. ‘It felt pretty tight-knit,’ he says. ‘Having all those decent clubs there meant everybody poured out at 3am afterwards. You could very easily run into X, Y and Z; people I knew, but I didn’t really know, from being at the same clubs.’ From there, he’d bump into the same faces at the afters. ‘That was a really nice way to get stuck into dance music and feel like you’re part of a scene. Not that I was even putting nights on. I was just always there.’

Things look somewhat different today for Barry Can’t Swim (otherwise known as Joshua Mainnie), whose debut album accrued nominations last year for a Brit Award, the Mercury Prize, and Scottish Album Of The Year Award. For one thing, his clubbing days are largely in the past, bar his transition behind the decks. ‘I’ve always seen myself as more of a producer than a DJ, even though I’m DJing a lot, and I love DJing.’ For another, he’s filling vastly bigger rooms. Though he never DJed Sneaky Pete’s (he started mixing later, after relocating south), he did once perform an early-career music project in the 100-capacity venue. Now he’s headlining behemoths such as Manchester’s Warehouse Project and planning his biggest ever transatlantic live tour. 

‘I still spend quite a lot of time up in Edinburgh,’ says Mainnie. ‘I DJed at my dad’s 60th birthday, which is pretty jokes.’ But London’s pull is undeniable. ‘It’s very easy to get inspired here. There is so much to stumble upon and randomly discover, and things you just hear. I love that about it.’ Mainnie’s taste for eclecticism is evident in his listening habits. Just this past year, he’s had The Fontaines, High Vis, Pink Floyd, and classic dance albums by Orbital and The Chemical Brothers on rotation. ‘It’s been nice listening to albums the way I would with a band, but with electronic artists. Sometimes nowadays, electronic musicians make albums and it feels like an opportunity to showcase singles and then some filler.’ Is crafting a cohesive album something he applies to his own music? ‘Definitely. That was the same with the first record, and it’s the same with this one.’

‘This one’ being Loner, Barry Can’t Swim’s second album, which darkens the warm, soulful tones he established on Where Will We Land?. It’s serendipitous that he’s brought up Headset. Some of his new tracks sound like they could have been released by Skillis’ label, brimming as they are with gnarly bass and skittering breakbeats, particularly ‘Different’ with its foghorn bassline. ‘I didn’t set out to do really heavy stuff,’ says Mainnie. ‘I’m always intrigued by different kinds of music. I reckon whatever I do next will be different to the second thing, because I get bored quite quickly of doing the same things.’

It was only after Mainnie started writing that Loner’s themes, which explore the loneliness and alienation which cloud our tech-driven zeitgeist, presented themselves. ‘Sometimes you need to put pen to paper before you realise what it is you’re even saying.’ The opening track, ‘The Person You’d Like To Be’, proved ‘revelatory’ and set the tone for this new record. ‘There’s a vocal throughout that track. I decided to take more vocals like that, chop them up and scatter them throughout the album.’ 

The track resembles Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Wear Sunscreen’, distorting kindly life advice into a monologue infused with paranoia. Lines such as ‘the best way to be liked is to be funny, make sure to be funny’ smack of self-optimisation culture, where a preoccupation with working on ourselves masks deeper anxieties. ‘A lot of what I wanted to talk about in the track was self-help and self-work,’ says Mainnie. ‘The moment you start talking about yourself with affirmations and ways you can improve yourself, you’re fundamentally saying there was something inherently wrong with you in the first place.’

The track sprang from Mainnie’s desire to collaborate with Séamus, a poet he’d watch at spoken-word nights around Edinburgh. ‘He doesn’t have any music online. He doesn’t have his poetry anywhere. He’s just mad talented.’ To brief his friend, Mainnie recommended several documentaries. ‘I was looking at meta-modernism and watching a lot of Adam Curtis,’ particularly All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, the filmmaker’s 2011 opus on failed tech utopias. Just as the beauty and terror of technology shapes Curtis’ aesthetic, so Loner oscillates between darkness and tranquility, contrasting dance music’s artificiality with organic sounds. 

On a largely electronically produced album, that sounds like an oxymoron. ‘Where do you draw that line? It almost doesn’t exist,’ Mainnie agrees. ‘I would include a piano in that, though that’s still, in a sense, been made by a machine. It’s just not a digital machine.’ To evoke ‘humanness’, he describes layering foley recordings of voices (ironically captured on his iPhone) as background sound. On ‘Kimpton’, he incorporated co-producer O’Flynn’s catalogue of vinyl scratches and live drum loops. ‘They’ve been played by a human, so you still have that feel even though you’ve made it on software.’

It would be easy to interpret Loner as purely a critique of technology, but this juxtaposition suggests nuance. ‘I imagine that around the industrial revolution, people were terrified of trains and these different things coming in. Then you’re born in a generation that didn’t know the time before, and you’re like, what of it? Now you see kids on iPads and it’s the norm.’ The same could be said of today’s debates around AI, which veer between visions of a supercharged workforce and mass redundancies. 

For Mainnie’s part, he maintains a measured outlook. ‘I think, like any technology, it’s scary at first, but we learn to work with it.’ While he hasn’t used AI to write hooks yet, he did feed Séamus’ voice through an AI voice generator. ‘There’s a push and pull between him and this other person, that’s kind of the same person, and they’re both fighting for space.’ He compares using AI to sampling, which was once treated with suspicion but is now prolific in dance music. ‘It changes the goalposts and means we can maybe write things in different ways.’

Another side to the alienation on Loner is less about tech and more Mainnie’s abrupt rise to celebrity. ‘I had my own dealing with self-doubt and imposter syndrome; nerves of being on stage and getting up in front of that many people. It’s mad to say this because I’ve been given the job that I do, but I don’t love being in front of lots of people.’ Mainnie’s attempts to calm himself triggered some dissociation. ‘I created a separation from myself as Josh and Barry as a performer to try and cope with that. It wasn’t the right thing to do, I realise that now, because actually it made me feel quite detached and isolated.’ Though he is quick to clarify that ‘90% of the change has been massively positive,’ writing Loner became a way to process everything. Thankfully, with his second album imminent, Mainnie has reconciled his two selves. ‘Now I feel like I step onstage as Josh.’

To reconnect with himself when he’s not touring, Mainnie opts for a quiet life. ‘When I’m back from show stuff, I like to do really ordinary, normal things,’ he says. Things like cooking, running, hanging out with mates. But it’s not easy to switch off from making music. ‘It would probably be helpful if I had more hobbies other than music, but I’m not really into much else, apart from football.’ Who’s his team? ‘I’m an Everton fan, unfortunately,’ he answers ruefully. 

As for the rest of us, does Mainnie have any suggestions for overcoming the isolation that technology has pushed on us and finding connection? His clubbing days may be done, but for those still out dancing, could the answer lie in spaces like Sneaky Pete’s? ‘I think club culture is doing that right now,’ he states. ‘You see that especially with people who are going to clubs for music. A lot of the time, there aren’t loads of phones out. I think people are really there to experience something and share a moment together. That’s what dance music is about, and has always been about; sharing a moment in time with a bunch of people you’ve never met before and never seeing them again. There’s something really beautiful about that.’

Loner is released by Ninja Tune on Friday 11 July; main picture: Ben Hanratty.