When he was six years old, the artist now known as Swimming Paul was on vacation with his family in the French Riviera. Despite the fact that he was, the French artist says now, “super bad at swimming,” he was splashing around in the hotel pool. Splashing around became flailing, which become sinking.
“A guy named Paul saved me,” he says. “He took me in his arms and put me back on the ground.” Years later, when he was starting to make electronic music and needed an artist name, he thought of the man who’d once saved him from drowning and christened himself Swimming Paul.
The stutter house producer, who only goes by his artist name has yet to reveal his face in press photos or on social media, is now swimming laps through the dance scene with upcoming U.S. festival plays at Day Trip, Electric Forest, Beyond Wonderland, Arc Music Festival and Breakaway Philadelphia, with just-announced headlining dates across North America and in Mexico City happening this fall and a flurry of summer festivals in Europe also in the mix.
Paul grew up in Paris in a family that listened to artists like The Prodigy, Fatboy Slim and Moby, and he started making electronic music himself when he was a teenager, taking inspiration from fellow countrymen like Daft Punk and Justice ,who were then dominating the global scene. “Young people were listening to this music,” he recalls, “and it was starting to be not super expensive to create music.”
Over time, his work started fusing together the sounds of his influences — Prodigy, Underworld, Swedish House Mafia — with that of U.K. IDM by artists like Bicep, Jamie xx and Fred again.. that he was also getting into. He was sending his music around and working as a sound engineer for project by friends, saying that in this era it was “easier to get noticed by meeting people and through word of mouth, because the market was less saturated, and it’s pretty much a small world.”
The Swimming Paul project officially launched in March 2023 with the release of “Your Song,” which fuses UKG, stutter house and the IDM of his influences. He went on the release a track every month for the next year. “I was making a lot of music, and I didn’t want to release a song then wait four months and release another song,” he says of this strategy. “I feel that nowadays, you really want to put a lot of music out, especially because now making music is much easier than used to be.”
His debut album, Smiling Through the Pain, came out in June of 2024, with its followup, Smiling Through the Pain 2, dropping last October. By this time he’d signed with France’s Unity Group, an artist agency that works across management, releases, publishing and synchs and has a roster that includes singer Emmit Fenn and Berlin producer Slim Soledad.
His very first show, meanwhile, happened in London in late 2024 at a 200-capacity club, with the venue sizes soon growing to 400, “then 1000,” he says, “then 2000.” By 2025, he was playing prestige events like the Do Lab stage at Coachella, Tomorrowland, CRSSD, Seismic Dance Event and Portola in San Francisco.
He says getting noticed was a “super natural, very step by step” process, with his work appealing to fans of artists like Fred again.., Jamie xx, Bunt. and Overmono. “It’s a community that loves this new electronica, this new easy house, emotional stuff. People were very hungry for this music, so there was already a scene for it.”
While Swimming Paul’s music places him in a very au courant scene, he remains a bit old-fashioned in terms of how he promotes himself.
“I don’t show my face on social media, and I don’t do TikTok or anything,” he says. While he loves the sense of mystery this creates, more so it’s because “I really, really hate talking in front of [a camera for] social media. It’s not my thing, and I don’t want to force myself to do it. I know a lot of DJ friends who are trapped in that bad cycle of posting when they don’t want to. I just want to make music.”
But he’s found a clever solution for this modern dilemma by simply turning the camera around and, he says, “making the people who listen to my music the face of it.” As such, his Instagram features largely images of people smiling in the crowd, holding up signs with requests and generally enjoying themselves at his shows.
Having observed these audiences while touring extensively across Europe and North American, the artist says in the U.S. he’s noticed an openness and enthusiasm, calling U.S. crowds “easier to please. I’m not saying they are just discovering this music because it’s been there a long time, but they want to party, for sure.”
Out in March of 2023, the shuffling beat, emotive vocals and wind-ey production on Swimming Paul’s first official release effectively sum up his style and approach.
This 2024 collab with Tiësto is Swimming Paul’s highest-streaming song to date, with 27.4 million streams on YouTube alone.
With a visualizer that ’90s kids will clock in a second, “Good Girl” is a collaboration with Beaux Neptune, and the latest Swimming Paul release.
Swimming Paul’s summer run across the U.S. launches later this month, when he make his debut at Michigan’s Electric Forest. That fest is followed by a show at Day Trip in Long Beach, Calif., with a set at The Gorge in Washington during Beyond Wonderland to follow. (In fact all three of these shows happen the same weekend, meaning a very past-paced few days for Paul.) He’ll then head back to Europe for a run of festival shows in across the continent, returning Stateside in September for sets at clubs and festivals clear into October. See his complete North American tour dates below.
While he’ll likely make many news fans along the way, there’s one person in particular he’s hoping to catch the eye of: Paul, the man who pulled him from the pool when he was a kid. “He doesn’t know I named myself after him,” says Swimming Paul, “and I don’t even know his family name. But it’s my dream to meet him.”
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