Joshua Spence Mainnie was born on 22 August 1992 and grew up in Edinburgh. He sat down at the piano at nine — after his grandfather spotted a “free to a good home” advert in the local paper and brought his grandson the instrument. Then came a music degree at Edinburgh Napier University, and you can hear it in every bar: the harmony in his tracks does not move in circles, as it does in most club electronics, but forward.

He calls himself a musician rather than a producer and insists that music should be made with instruments. How It Feels is built on a vocal sample and a piano figure that could easily have been a soul ballad, had there not been a kick drum underneath.

The debut EP Amor Fati came out in July 2021 on Shall Not Fade, followed in 2022 by More Content on Technicolour, an imprint of Ninja Tune. And on 20 October 2023, on Ninja Tune itself, came the full-length When Will We Land? — number twelve in the UK albums chart, best dance album according to BBC Radio 1, and a place on the 2024 Mercury Prize shortlist. It is a rare case of a purely dance record standing on that list beside singer-songwriter rock and rap albums.

The rest arrived at the same time: the DJ Mag breakthrough producer award in December 2023, a BRIT Awards nomination, Coachella 2024 — where he closed the weekend with a surprise back-to-back set with Bonobo at the Do Lab stage.

The second album, Loner, came out on 11 July 2025. Mainnie explained the difference himself: if the first record was a collage of the music he loved and grew up on, this one is the most honest expression of himself and his own life that he could manage. In August of the same year he headlined London’s All Points East festival.