Swimming Pole, Billboard’s Emerging Dance Artist of the Month

The artist, now known as Swimming Paul, was vacationing with his family on the Riviera of the Cote d’Azur when he was six years old. The French artist has now been playing in his hotel pool, even though he was “very bad at swimming”. The surrounding droplets fluttered and sank.

“A man named Paul saved me,” he says. “He took me in his arms and brought me back to the ground.” Years later, when he started making electronic music and needed an artist name, he remembered the man who had once saved him from drowning and named himself Swimming Pole.

The Statter House producer, who goes by his artist name only and has not yet been identified in press photos or on social media, is currently making his way through the dance scene with US festival appearances scheduled at Day Trip, Electric Forest, Beyond Wonderland, Ark Music Festival and Breakaway Philadelphia. Headlining shows have just been announced for this fall across North America and in Mexico City, with summer festivals planned for Europe one after another.

Paul grew up in Paris in a family that listened to artists such as The Prodigy, Fatboy Slim and Moby, and began making his own electronic music as a teenager, drawing inspiration from compatriots such as Daft Punk and Justice, who were then dominating the global scene. “Young people were listening to this music, and it was starting to become less expensive to make music,” he recalls.

Over time, his work began to blend the sounds of his influences, such as The Prodigy, Underworld, and Swedish House Mafia, with the sounds of UK IDM from artists such as Bicep, Jamie xx, and Fred, which he became obsessed with. He shared his music with others and worked as a sound engineer on friends’ projects. During this time, he said, “the market wasn’t saturated and it was almost a small world, so it was easy to meet people and get noticed through word of mouth.”

The Swimming Pole Project officially launched in March 2023 with the release of “Your Song,” a fusion of UKG, Stutter House, and his IDM influences. He continued to release one song each month over the next year. “I was making a lot of music, so I didn’t want to release a song and then wait four months to release another one,” he says of this strategy. “I think people really want to put out a lot of music these days, especially because it’s so much easier to make music now than it used to be.”

His debut album, Smiling Through the Pain, was released in June 2024, and its sequel, Smiling Through the Pain 2, was released last October. By this time he had signed with France’s Unity Group. Unity Group is a management, release, publishing and synchronization artist agency whose roster includes singer Emmit Fenn and Berlin producer Slim Soledad.

Meanwhile, his first show took place in late 2024 at a 200-capacity club in London, with the venue quickly expanding to 400, “then 1000” and “then 2000,” he says. By 2025, he was performing at high-end events such as Coachella’s Do Lab Stage, Tomorrowland, CRSSD, Seismic Dance Events, and San Francisco’s Portola.

He said gaining attention was a “very natural, very gradual” process, and his work appealed to fans of artists such as Fred Again, Jamie XX and Bunt. And over-the-top stuff. “It’s a community that loves this new electronica, new easy house, emotional stuff. People were so hungry for this music that there was already a scene.”

Why Swimming Paul is an up-and-coming dance artist

Although Swimming Pole’s music puts him in a very glamorous scene, he remains a little old-fashioned in terms of how he promotes himself.

“I don’t appear on social media, I don’t do anything on TikTok,” he says. He loves the sense of mystery it creates, but more because “I really, really hate public speaking.” [a camera for] social media. It’s not my strong suit and I don’t want to force myself to do it. I know a lot of DJ friends who are stuck in a bad cycle of posting even when they don’t want to. I just want to make music. ”

But he says he’s found a clever solution to this modern-day dilemma by simply rolling his camera and “putting that face on the people listening to my music.” As a result, his Instagram is mostly filled with images of people smiling in crowds, holding placards with requests, and enjoying his shows.

The artist, who has observed these audiences while touring extensively in Europe and North America, said he has noticed a tolerance and enthusiasm in the U.S., saying American audiences are “easier to please. I’m not saying they’ve just discovered this music because it’s been around a long time, but they certainly want to party.”

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