New Music
swim school: “We had us three giving 100%. That’s when it really took off as a band”
One of Ticketmaster’s Breakthrough Artists 2025 talk new album, upcoming tour and the raw power of constantly pushing boundaries
An indie trio that salutes its legacy with an irrepressible desire to push its sound forward, swim school give lessons in style-surfing that defies easy definition. Formed in Edinburgh in the late 2010s, the band went through a couple of line-up changes before Alice Johnson (vocals & guitar), Lewis Bunting (guitar) and Billy McMahon (drums) found the right dynamics that took an electrifying range of influences – grunge, indie pop, the ‘90s shoegaze of Slowdive and the contemporary alt-rock of Wolf Alice, to name but a few – and propelled them into the future.
Riding against a constant tide of contempt in the industry for a talented female with a guitar – experiences that the team transformed into a slaying manifesto against sexism in 2023 single ‘Delirious’ – they set off to conquer crowds in the UK and Europe with a few EPs and hundreds of shows. With their eponymous debut LP in hand (out 3 October) the band will embark on a headline UK-EU tour this November. “We’re just so amazed we deserve it!”, says Johnson while summing up an exhilarating two weeks of singing and mosh pits during their smaller, sold-out 2024 tour. “Being an artist, you’re critical on yourself,” she affirms, making it clear that streaming numbers don’t always translate to confidence. “Everyone thinks that is success but it’s not until you go out and you actually see how many people know you. That’s when you’re really, ‘OK we’re doing pretty well!’”
Here, the trio talk about distilling the essence of swim school on their much-awaited debut and a music journey, both figurative and literal, that is ongoing.
So is there a story behind swim school? Any cherished aquatic experiences or is it more, like, sink or swim?
Johnson: I’ve not really thought of it that way but I do like that one! No, basically when we first started we had a gig booked but we didn’t have a name. We sat for ages trying to come up with a name. We loved Art School but that was taken by Art School Girlfriend and then, we were like, what other subjects have we got? swim school is easy, you can remember it, there’s no meaning behind it at all but um, I might steal what you just said!
You had a couple of line-up changes early on. With Billy joining on the drums you drove your sound harder. You strike me as a band that embraces change and challenges and uses them to push your sound forward..
Johnson: One thing we always said we weren’t gonna be is a band that just releases the same song over and over again in different key. We love all genres of music and I think you can really hear that. If we were all massive, like, Arctic Monkeys fans and that’s all we’d listen to, I think our songs would be very similar to them. But our love for music is a massive range of all these different genres and artists, whether it’s the heavy, fast stuff or the more stripped-back emotional. We basically just wanted to make it really difficult to put a genre on ourselves and I think we’ve done that pretty well.
Bunting: If you take a band like Fontaines D.C. who started out as a post-punk band and you look at them now, they’re incorporating rap and all that type of thing. I think it’s really important for guitar bands especially to be evolving just so you’re not all something like Guns N’ Roses or Oasis. I think the guitar music scene has taken influence from a lot of other genres and that’s really starting to show just now. And we really want to fit in that kinda area. I’m not saying we’re gonna start rapping and stuff but we just want to keep pushing the boundaries and pushing our sound and challenging ourselves.
McMahon: We are fans of music, we go to a lot of live shows and have been inspired by watching bands live. We go as consumers and think, “What they’ve done is brilliant, let’s try and do something along the lines of that”. When you’re thinking of a live show you want to make sure, if someone’s watching for an hour and a half, it’s not predictable after the first couple of songs. There’s a bit of diversity. We’ve got some songs where it strips back to Alice and the guitar. Some where it’s very crowd participation with the mosh pits. Coming into 2025, we’ve recruited a friend of ours called Lee to play some bass for the live show. And that’s based on last year, looking at what perhaps the set was lacking and thinking we want to get that bass and that kind of live sound back –especially doing an album. So, yeah, it’s a constant growth, a constant looking at what everyone’s kind of doing around us, being inspired and trying to constantly take the band to the next level.
Alice, you have some horror stories of sexism in the industry –and you have ‘Delirious’ to show for it, which really seems to resonate. With more people talking openly about misogyny in music, have you seen any signs that the message is getting through?
Johnson: ‘Delirious’ was one of the first songs that, I think we recognised when we released it… Βecause it had such a strong message behind it it got the attention of radio presenters, so we did a lot of interviews. Βut it’s funny that, when we wrote it, it wasn’t meant to be our best human song. I think it was in 2022, we had a very long festival season, which was amazing but then it was a lot of male sound engineers being not very nice –I’m not gonna swear but not very nice. I remember being in a hotel room after our last festival and, again, I’d had a shocking experience and I said to the boys that I really want an angry, middle-finger-up song about sexism. When we got home, we just started jamming and then we wrote ‘Delirious’. I had no lyrics for it when it came to recording a demo and then I didn’t even write them down, I just did kind of freestyles, not in a rap way, but of whatever was inside. I just let it out. It was probably one of the quickest songs we’ve ever written so it does really show you that you don’t need to spend hours and hours, and days and weeks working on a song to make it do good. It was just a blunt and honest experience of things that I’d been through.
It’s doing pretty well in streaming, and it is such a big part of our live set too. But I also think you do get a lot of people coming up to you at the end of gigs saying how they resonate with it and they can get angry in the mosh pit –I get angry in the mosh pit as well.
Getting more girls in the mosh pit!
Johnson: Exactly! Our mosh pits are, like, a mixture of older bald men and then young guys, and then young girls and older women. It’s a massive mixture of all these different people, and that’s what a swim school gig is.
You have a strong reputation as a live band, and you already have a few EPs under your belt. It’s so hard to make it work as a musician these days, I wonder if this was something that happened organically or it was a strategic decision on your part, like, “We need to give it 100% cause anything less is not going to work”. Not in a calculating way but, really, because that’s the only way?
Johnson: None of it was strategic. We do have a manager who guides us in the right direction and offers advice and we really trust him. We’ve got a great relationship with our team around us so they can take care of the…you’d say, business-side and whatnot. But then, I think we’ve probably got the most important job, which is creating the art that they can then turn into business.
We’ve had members leave because they weren’t giving 100% and when we had us three giving 100%, that’s when it really took off as a band. I think it just proves to you that if you’re not in it for the right reasons or you’re not in it 100% then it’s never gonna get anywhere. So it wasn’t on purpose, we just love it and there’s nothing else that makes us happy as this. There’s no stopping us. Even if it takes 1,000 years to get there, we’ll still be doing it!
Bunting: There’s so many variables within the music industry now that require you to give 100% at all times. It’s a very time-consuming process, it takes a lot of practice and you gotta give it 100% just to push forward from playing small gigs to bigger stuff.
McMahon: Nowadays for someone who’s starting out it’s that decision that you need to make from the offset: are you a musician or are you a content creator? I think nowadays the two things get misunderstood. I’m not throwing any shit at anyone, by the way. Anyone who gets up and on a stage is a friend of mine! But you do look and you can see what’s been manipulated and what’s been targeted. Like, “I’d quite fancy doing that”. Whereas, the way we started was in a room writing songs and starting off playing to four people and then 40 people and then 400 people. So we’ve been through every process of the way.
The content stuff is hard, don’t get me wrong, that is like a full-time job alongside being a musician. But I feel like, if you remember the reason why you started the band and the reason why you wanted to be on a stage, which is because you got your first instrument and you just wanted to make music with your friends, I think that’s the most important thing in the world. Everything else is just something that you have to do and as long as it’s authentic and it feels real, then it doesn’t feel forced. We make sure everything that we do, from writing songs to performing songs to getting the message out there, it’s 100% real.
Your debut album is coming up. What are the themes, the sounds, how much do you feel you’ve grown in this time? You tap into that raw live energy for this album, for one, right?
Johnson: It was actually when we were in the middle of recording the album, I think it was Billy or Lewis that said, “I can’t imagine playing this album live without a bassist”. Like, this isn’t a backing-track kind of situation, this deserves a real bassist. Listening back to the songs we recorded and wrote at the start of the album cycle, even to now, you can kind of hear how the sound changes and matures, but it’s still still us. We basically went into this album writing nine amazing tracks that we can resonate with, that we can play when we’re, like, 70 years old, still on stage, and that we still love.
We didn’t go in too deep about how to get a commercial or how to write a hit single. There’s a few co-writes but most of them are just our own songs and you can really hear that. We wanted an album that was like a journey. It’s not quite cringey, but stereotypical to say, we just wanted an album that was some of our best work. And I think that’s what we’ve got, basically.
McMahon: We thought for our debut album we’d be in a studio for four weeks, and basically bashing it from start to finish and then that chapter would be closed and you’d open it up again when it’s released. But just because of the work-life balance… We work. This isn’t all we do. We have life events that get in the way. So this has been a process, from the minute we found out that the album is getting done, it’s probably been about… 10 months? And over those 10 months a lot has changed, and it’s been lots of sessions. So it feels like each song that we’ve done at a certain point along the way, that was a time stamp of what we were feeling at that moment in time. And if we listen back to this album in six years’ time, we’ll be like, I remember exactly what was good at that moment, how I felt, what Ι was going through. We wanted it to be a process that wasn’t crammed into a short period of time. Βecause there have been some songs where we’ve gone back and been like, “Τhat doesn’t resonate now as it did when I wrote that song, so let’s kinda change it”. And then obviously getting the bass thing in as well, just different dynamics, that feels like growth. And, obviously the album is called swim school, and it just feels that over the four-five years we’ve been in this band, this is what we’re very proud of.
Bunting: We always wanted to be a guitar band and I feel like this album is a perfect example of what in our heads a guitar band should be like. There’s influences from the ‘90s and bands like Oasis, Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine, all that type of thing, but then we’ve also paid attention to modern influences that we’re listening to just now as well. I’m not saying we’ve ripped them off but I just feel like we’ve really touched into those influences and tried to portray it the best we can.
Being from Edinburgh, which has a rather small music scene, do you find it limiting in some ways or that it fosters a sense of camaraderie? Do you see yourselves somewhere else in the future?
Johnson: We love Edinburgh. We wouldn’t change the fact we’re from here at all. The only thing is that there isn’t a big live scene. There used to be but then the council decided to shut every venue and replace it with student accommodation. And because it is such a student-y city, nobody really stays. They come, they study, then they leave, so there’s never enough time for communities and cultures to grow. Which is a massive shame. Cause you go through to Glasgow and you see how many venues they have and that’s why everyone goes there. But, again, we’ve never let that stop us.
McMahon: The stereotypical thing for a band, especially when you’re Scottish, your homecoming show is always Glasgow, unfortunately. But every time we do a tour, we always push to do something in Edinburgh. Like Alice says, to try and build a community and if we can be a bit responsible for bringing something back to the city that we grew up in, that we love, that we started this band, it’s so important. I think when fans do see the tour announcements and
there’s no Edinburgh there our advice is always just, hold on, we’ll try and get something –and that’s not any teaser by the way! Glasgow is this massive music city that serves a purpose that Edinburgh just can’t allow us to do. Hopefully we can play Edinburgh as much as we can in the future cause it’s sick, the hometown crowd!
No more gentrification, spread the love.
McMahon: Exactly!
