Swimming Paul - Smiling Through The Pain 2 (Preorder 28/11/25)

Swimming Paul - Smiling Through The Pain 2

Label: Unity Records - STTP2025LP - 3516628500015
Format: 2LP, Album, Black
Country: UK
Released: 28th Nov 2025
Genre: Electronic
Style: Electronic

Description
Swimming Paul’s music has always lived in the push-and-pull between euphoria and melancholy; the rare kind of electronic music that can make you cry while your body keeps moving. On Smiling Through the Pain 2, the French-born, London-based producer doubles down on that emotional duality, delivering an album that feels as much like a diary as it does a DJ set.



Over the course of 15 tracks, Paul stitches together late-night catharsis, suburban nostalgia, and the jagged tenderness of early adulthood. The record is sequenced like an unbroken night out: the giddy anticipation, the sudden moments of reflection, the quiet comedown as the sun edges in. It’s an album that refuses to treat joy and sadness as opposites, they coexist here, often in the same chord progression.

 “I don’t want to escape the feelings, I want to bring them with me” Paul says. “If you can’t stop thinking about something, you might as well dance with it."

That philosophy runs through the singles: the emotional release of Holly (with Junior Simba), the aching nostalgia of Different Time, the hypnotic haze of Hard 2 Sleep, and the house-driven Drinking to Get Drunk, a bittersweet ode to nights spent outrunning your own thoughts. Elsewhere, Liza M1 folds heartbreak into an almost triumphant piano hook, while Shine a Light urges listeners to take risks and live without hesitation—as if youth’s boldness could be bottled.



Smiling Through the Pain 2 is an invitation to feel everything at once. To sweat through the sadness. To let your guard down under strobe lights. To realise that the best nights out don’t make you forget; they help you remember.