Josh Baker, You&Me and the Long Road From Manchester to Amnesia 2026

Josh Baker is a house DJ and producer born and raised in Manchester, and he records under his own name. MusicTech described him as 30 in January 2026, which makes him 30 or 31 now; his date of birth has not been published. He co-founded You&Me Records and Hide&Seek Festival, runs the SYNTHO production school, and won DJ Mag's Best of British Breakthrough Producer award in December 2024. His first Ibiza residency, You&Me at Amnesia, has run every Thursday on the Terraza since 2 July 2026 and ends with the closing party on Thursday 1 October 2026. The next night he headlines the first of two sold-out You&Me shows at The Warehouse Project's Depot Mayfield in Manchester, on Friday 2 and Saturday 3 October. In June he played The Valley main stage at Parklife 2026 on Saturday 20 June, in a 2:30pm to 4pm slot on the same stage as Prospa, Nia Archives, Skepta and Sammy Virji. The 2026 numbers are large, but the actual story is the eleven years of infrastructure that arrived underneath them.

This is MNEEMO's editorial analysis on why Josh Baker's 2026 hype cycle is the slowest, most deliberately built UK house breakthrough of the year, written from a London-based UK garage producer's perspective inside the same UK club ecosystem.

Fact-check note: This article distinguishes between confirmed event information and editorial interpretation. Parklife 2026 and Hide&Seek 2026 have now taken place; their set times are given as published before the events. The Amnesia residency dates are as listed by Amnesia and Ibiza Spotlight in September 2026.

Josh Baker: quick facts

• Name: Josh Baker, who records and DJs under his own name
• Age: 30 in January 2026 (MusicTech); date of birth not published
• Origin: Born and raised in Manchester, UK (DJ Mag, The Mancunion)
• Currently based: Manchester
• Pivotal early venue: Sankeys Manchester
• First You&Me venue: Koh Tao, a Thai-beach-themed student bar in Fallowfield, Manchester, in the room now called Nest
• You&Me launch: 2015, after a summer in Ibiza
• You&Me co-founders: Josh Baker with Kurt, Dan and Dash
• Hide&Seek Festival launch: 31 August 2019 (Capesthorne Hall, Cheshire)
• Hide&Seek 2026: 24 to 26 July, Weston Park, Shropshire
• SYNTHO production school launch: approximately 2020; 700+ courses advertised in 2026
• DJ Mag Best of British 2024: Breakthrough Producer (won, 12 December 2024)
• 2026 Parklife: Saturday 20 June, The Valley main stage, 2:30pm to 4pm
• 2026 Amnesia You&Me residency: First Ibiza residency. Thursdays, Terraza, 2 July to 1 October 2026 (14 weeks), closing party Thursday 1 October
• Next Manchester dates: You&Me at The Warehouse Project, Depot Mayfield, Friday 2 October (19:00 to 04:00) and Saturday 3 October 2026 (16:00 to 04:00), both sold out
• Chart singles: "Back It Up" with Omar+ (UK No. 58, 2025), "You Don't Own Me" with Prospa and RAHH (UK No. 94, 2025), "My Place" with Poppy Baskcomb (UK No. 52, 2026)

The thesis: built backwards from the hype cycle

Josh Baker's 2026 calendar reads like an industry-pushed breakthrough story. Amnesia Thursdays. Parklife main stage. DJ Mag Breakthrough Producer winner. A long DJ Mag feature in August 2025 under the title "Josh Baker: next in line." Major collaborations with Prospa and RAHH ("You Don't Own Me," 2025) charting on the UK Official Singles Chart. A new EP on his own label every twelve to eighteen months. By the standard music industry reading, this is what an artist looks like after a major label invests in them and a publicist clears the runway.

That is not what happened.

The actual sequence is the opposite. Baker started running You&Me parties at a student bar called Koh Tao in Fallowfield, Manchester, in 2015. He launched Hide&Seek Festival in 2019. He launched SYNTHO production school in approximately 2020. He won DJ Mag Best of British Breakthrough Producer in December 2024. Only in 2025 and 2026, after roughly a decade of running infrastructure, did Parklife main-stage and Amnesia residency bookings arrive. The DJ Mag award is dated December 2024, nine years into the You&Me brand, five years into Hide&Seek, four years into SYNTHO. The "breakthrough" was an institutional one, after the operator infrastructure was already there.

This is the editorial point. Josh Baker built the scene before the scene built him. The 2026 hype cycle is the industry catching up to a Manchester operator who spent the entire 2010s and early 2020s building the rooms, the label, the festival and the education platform around his own sound. By the time Amnesia handed him a 14-week Thursday residency on the Terraza, he had been running You&Me for over a decade, Hide&Seek for seven years and SYNTHO for about five.

What this article is not claiming

This article is not claiming Josh Baker is bigger than peers like Chris Stussy (now Chris Stassy), KETTAMA, Mall Grab, Jamie Jones or East End Dubs. It is not claiming the You&Me Records label is on the scale of Hot Creations or Crosstown Rebels. The narrower defensible claim is that Josh Baker's 2026 visibility cycle is structurally different from a standard major-label artist breakthrough because the producer-led infrastructure (You&Me, Hide&Seek, SYNTHO) was already in place before the festival, residency and award visibility arrived. That sequence is rare in modern dance music, and it makes the 2026 story worth analysing on its own terms rather than as a generic "rising DJ" profile.

Who is Josh Baker? The Manchester operator behind the residency

Josh Baker is a Manchester-based DJ, producer, label boss, festival co-founder and production educator. The Manchester roots are not decorative. They are documented across every interview he gives and every business he runs.

Baker started DJing informally around the age of 16 with a friend's controller, attending Manchester club nights as a teenager. The pivot point was Sankeys, the long-running underground club in Beehive Mill, Ancoats, which closed in January 2017, where Baker has repeatedly said he fell in love with electronic music. Speaking to Flow Music in 2018 he said simply: "Sankeys was a place where I really fell in love with electronic music." In a 2025 Ibiza Spotlight interview he expanded the picture: "I went to Warehouse Project so much when I was starting out, around the age of 16," and on Sankeys: "There was a club called Sankeys, which was like a real institution."

Production followed in his late teens. He told Flow Music: "I got into producing music when I was 17." The DAW journey is documented through interviews, he started on Logic and later switched to Ableton, the workflow he now teaches inside SYNTHO.

The professional DJ trajectory crystallised around an Ibiza summer in his late teens, where extended after-parties at a villa with friends turned what had been a hobby into a working career. As he told Flow Music: "So You&Me started back in 2015 after a summer in Ibiza." That single sentence ties the entire arc together. Manchester gave him the initial education at Sankeys and Warehouse Project. Ibiza gave him the moment when DJing stopped being a side activity. You&Me was the answer he and his friends came up with when no UK promoter would book them: build the night yourselves.

You&Me: the Fallowfield student-bar origin

Most coverage of Josh Baker treats You&Me as a single label-and-event brand. The actual origin is more specific.

The first You&Me parties happened at Koh Tao in Fallowfield, Manchester, in 2015. The Mancunion describes it as a Thai-beach-themed student bar in the room now known as Nest, in the south Manchester student belt. Baker himself in the 2018 Flow Music interview attributed the launch decision to a small founding group, not a solo project: "Me and my good friends Kurt, Dan and Dash all decided the time was right to create a new brand."

You&Me's early curatorial signal was clear. Inside the first run of parties Baker brought in names like Dyed Soundorom, Shonky, Subb-an, Enzo Siragusa, Spokenn and Archie Hamilton: a roster that reads as a deliberate alignment with the European minimal house and tech house scene of the mid-2010s, before that aesthetic had its current festival-stage commercial pull in the UK. By booking those acts in a small Fallowfield student bar, You&Me established a sonic identity (groove-heavy, minimal-leaning house) and a venue ethos (small, dedicated, Manchester-specific) that has stayed consistent through the brand's growth.

The label side of You&Me Records grew out of the event ecosystem rather than launching alongside it. Releases on the label include Baker's own catalogue (Energy, the Come Closer EP from December 2025, YM006, Information Overload, earlier vinyl-led EPs like Tropic and Scratchcard Luck). The Come Closer EP reached No. 3 on the Official Dance Albums Chart. Baker described the December 2025 EP to DJ Mag as "five tracks on my beloved You&Me Records, each one representing a different shade of what I've been cooking over the last 18 months."

The structural point is that You&Me is the first of Baker's three operator businesses, not a side project. Everything downstream (Hide&Seek, SYNTHO, the residencies, the awards) sits on top of the brand identity that started at Koh Tao in 2015.

Hide&Seek Festival: 2019 launch, infrastructure expansion

Four years after You&Me's first Fallowfield party, Baker scaled the brand into festival format.

Hide&Seek Festival launched on 31 August 2019 at Capesthorne Hall, a stately home in Cheshire, curated by You&Me with all its afterparties in Manchester (Mixmag, April 2019). Manchester Confidential covered the launch announcement in April 2019 and The Mancunion previewed the inaugural edition in June 2019. Manchester's Finest later traced the festival's roots back to smaller You&Me events, describing it as starting from 200-person Fallowfield throwdowns before scaling to Manchester city centre and then the countryside festival format. The Festival Voice's 2021 coverage credited the entire event as "curated by Josh Baker."

The Festical listing puts Hide&Seek's capacity at about 5,000. Skiddle has described the festival as "a day of vintage house, disco & techno" in the Cheshire countryside. The aesthetic is consistent with You&Me's club identity: minimal house, tech house, deep house, with broader curatorial space for disco and techno excursions. It is not an EDM-mainstream festival. It is a curated extension of the same audience and sound that started in a Fallowfield student bar.

In 2026, Hide&Seek ran 24 to 26 July at Weston Park in Shropshire, across six stages (the festival's own site), after moving from Capesthorne Hall. There is also a personal-family note inside the Hide&Seek origin story: in Manchester's Finest's 2022 interview, Baker said "My Mum found the site" for the festival. That detail (a UK festival rooted in a venue choice made by the founder's mother) is uncommon enough to be worth recording, and consistent with the broader pattern of Baker's businesses being built in close-knit, personal ways rather than through corporate licensing deals.

SYNTHO: the production school inside the operator stack

The third pillar of Baker's infrastructure is the most non-obvious.

SYNTHO is an online music production education platform launched by Baker in approximately 2020. By Baker's own account on social media, a LinkedIn post dated mid-2024 says "4 years ago today I launched SYNTHO," placing the launch around 2020. In the same telling, the concept grew out of one-to-one production lessons he gave over Zoom during the pandemic lockdowns, turned into a membership site.

By 2026, SYNTHO has scaled to a much larger operation. The platform's own website now advertises 700+ music production courses, one-to-one track feedback and live classrooms. In May 2025 Music Week counted 560 tutorials and users in more than 73 countries. Music Week's profile of the platform framed it as an "electronic music education platform" with an entrepreneurial founder-led structure, explicitly positioning it inside the broader UK music-tech startup landscape rather than as a vanity educational project.

The reported business numbers are notable. Apiko's case study on SYNTHO claims the platform generated $1 million in subscription revenue in 2025, with 360+ hours of content and 560 production tutorials in six languages. In January 2026 MusicTech reported that Hazel Savage, founder of Musiio and a former SoundCloud executive, had joined SYNTHO as CEO. (Treat that revenue figure as vendor case-study reported data, not independently audited; but the relative scale claim, that SYNTHO is a real subscription-based business rather than a marketing tool, is consistent with everything else publicly known about the platform.)

The structural reading: SYNTHO is the third leg of Baker's operator stack, and unlike the first two it is fundamentally about exporting process rather than music. You&Me exports tracks. Hide&Seek exports an annual event. SYNTHO exports the production methodology behind both. That is unusual in current dance music. Most major DJs have a label and a few brand partnerships. Very few run an active production school that competes with established academies like Point Blank, ICON Collective and Toolroom Academy. SYNTHO gives Baker an unusual position inside UK dance music: few, if any, UK house DJs in 2026 run a major residency, a festival brand, a label and an active education platform at the same time.

The DJ Mag Best of British 2024: industry catches up

The first major institutional acknowledgement of Baker's stack came on 12 December 2024 at The Steel Yard in London, when DJ Mag's Best of British Awards 2024 named him Breakthrough Producer of the Year.

The same award cycle that year named Joy Orbison as Best DJ and PAWSA as Best Producer, placing Baker's win inside one of UK dance music's most credibility-forward annual ceremonies. DJ Mag's published winner write-up included two important quotes from Baker on the production sound that earned the award. He told the magazine: "It's for the dancefloor; it's fun, with groovy basslines, nice chords, fairly simple, not super intricate…" And on the underground-to-radio crossover: "This year my music's got catchier, but I stayed true to myself… It still kills at underground clubs and gets played at DC-10, but Radio 1 are playing it too."

That second quote is the cleanest articulation of Baker's 2024 positioning. Underground credibility plus radio function. Tracks that work at DC-10 Ibiza and on BBC Radio 1 in the same month. Eight months later DJ Mag came back for a longer profile, the feature "Josh Baker: next in line" by Mick Wilson, published on 26 August 2025, covering the build-up to his Ibiza dates and the broader You&Me strategy. That sequence (Best of British in December 2024, deep DJ Mag profile in August 2025, Amnesia residency announcement for 2026) is the institutional curve catching up to the operator infrastructure that had been in place since 2015.

Amnesia 2026: the first-ever Ibiza residency

Baker's 2026 Ibiza residency is the most career-defining commercial moment of his career to date.

You&Me at Amnesia Ibiza runs every Thursday from 2 July to 1 October 2026, a 14-week takeover of the Terraza, widely regarded as one of the most prestigious DJ rooms on the island. Amnesia's own promotional copy explicitly frames this as Baker's first-ever Ibiza residency: the moment when years of one-off island shows and being a clubber on the island himself become a structured weekly residency on Amnesia's flagship room.

Before the season, Ibiza Spotlight reported that Baker and Joseph Capriati would play back-to-back at Amnesia's 2026 Opening Party. The You&Me residency's own opening night, on Thursday 2 July, put Josh Baker b2b Prospa on the Terraza with Cloonee, jWave b2b Job de Jong, and Yass & Mali, and Shonky b2b Dyed Soundorom, Moxie, Mar-T and Local Dub in the Main Room; Ibiza Spotlight reported the pre-sale sold out. The closing party on Thursday 1 October opens at 16:00, with Baker playing sunset and sunrise sets on the Terraza alongside A-Z, Alexandria, Enzo Siragusa b2b Silva Bumpa, Laidlaw, Marsolo, Max Dean and Moxie, and tickets listed from 80 euros on Amnesia's site. The b2b with Prospa is not a one-off booking, Baker and Prospa collaborated on "You Don't Own Me" (with vocalist RAHH) in June 2025, a track that charted on the UK Official Singles Sales Chart at #21 and represents the cleanest sonic alliance between Manchester (Baker) and Leeds (Prospa) in the current UK rave-house revival.

Speaking to Ibiza Spotlight in July 2025 ahead of the residency announcement, Baker described his career philosophy in one phrase: "I think the phrase is 'delayed gratification'. I wasn't in a rush to try and build a career. At the start, I was really focused on the passion for music; I just enjoyed doing it." That single line is the most quotable summary of his entire arc.

Parklife 2026: the Manchester homecoming

Two weeks before the Amnesia residency opened its first Thursday, Baker played his largest Manchester moment to date.

Parklife 2026 at Heaton Park put Baker on Saturday 20 June, The Valley main stage, 2:30pm to 4pm (per The Manc's published stage splits), and Parklife's own post-festival message thanks him by name. The Valley is Parklife's flagship outdoor stage. That Saturday it ran Prospa (1pm to 2:30pm) into Baker, then 4am Kru, Nia Archives and Skepta, with Sammy Virji closing from 9:30pm to 11pm.

The trajectory across Baker's Parklife history is what makes the 2026 booking significant. MCR Pulse has reported that Baker opened the G Stage at Parklife 2022. In 2025, MusicTech reported, his home-city Parklife set became a flashpoint when overcrowding forced the stage to be shut down. By 2026 he was on The Valley main stage in a mid-afternoon slot. That is a four-year arc inside one festival from opener of a smaller stage to mid-afternoon main-stage placement: a parallel trajectory to Sammy Virji's own 2024 Valley afternoon b2b to 2026 Valley closer, and a structural escalation that Parklife only gives to artists with serious live demand.

The deeper editorial point is that Parklife 2026 was Baker's Manchester homecoming. The whole story started in Manchester (Sankeys, Warehouse Project, Koh Tao Fallowfield) and was validated on Manchester's biggest annual outdoor stage two weeks before the Ibiza residency that defined his summer. Both happened in the same June to July window. Both reflect the same decade-long arc.

2025 and 2026 production: Come Closer EP and the You&Me catalogue

Baker's recent release schedule on his own label has tightened into a recognisable cadence.

"Something To Me" and "Misleading" were Baker's standout 2024 singles, identified by DJ Mag as the tracks that helped define his sound around the Best of British win. "You Don't Own Me" (with Prospa featuring RAHH) released June 2025 and charted on the UK Official Singles Chart at #94 and the Official Singles Sales Chart at #21. It was not his first chart hit: "Back It Up" with Omar+ had already reached No. 58 on the Official Singles Chart in April 2025. Come Closer EP released on You&Me Records in December 2025: a five-track package Baker described as "each one representing a different shade of what I've been cooking over the last 18 months." 2026 has brought "Feel This Way" with Silva Bumpa and Paige Cavell in January, "My Place" with Poppy Baskcomb in July (No. 52 on the Official Singles Chart) and "Breaking Point" in September.

Beyond his own catalogue, Baker's collaboration with London producer Omar+ (on "Back It Up") sits inside the broader UK garage and house crossover that has defined the Northern UK club scene from 2024 to 2026. That sound family (Josh Baker, Omar+, Prospa, KETTAMA) represents one of the cleanest peer ecosystems in current UK and Irish dance music, built on actual shared studio time and shared festival bills rather than just curatorial booking patterns.

January 2026 also brought a major MusicTech feature on Baker's production workflow, AI tools, delegation and live visuals, anchored around the "Feel This Way" release. That coverage establishes Baker not just as a DJ act but as a producer whose technical decisions are studied by other producers: exactly the credential SYNTHO is built around.

Sound profile: groove-heavy, underground crossover, club-functional

The cleanest description of Baker's sound is the one he gave DJ Mag himself. "It's for the dancefloor; it's fun, with groovy basslines, nice chords, fairly simple, not super intricate."

Translated into editorial framing: Baker sits in the sweet spot between underground credibility and functional accessibility. Groove-heavy enough to read as serious house music inside DC-10 and Amnesia. Polished and structurally simple enough to translate into BBC Radio 1 daytime rotation. Less cerebral than minimal techno acts. Less radio-pop-leaning than pure tech-house chart producers. His tempo range tracks roughly between 125 and 132 BPM, his percussion is groove-led rather than aggressive, and his vocal usage is selective rather than centred.

Within the broader UK and European house wave of 2024 to 2026, Baker reads as a deliberate curator-producer rather than a viral-track-maker. The discography is steady. The releases are timed. The catalogue is built around long-arc EPs rather than weekly TikTok-driven singles. That approach is unusual in 2026's algorithmic-velocity dance music economy, and it is consistent with the operator-first identity that runs through every piece of his infrastructure.

Peer ecosystem: Prospa, Omar+, KETTAMA, Chris Stussy and the M62 corridor

Baker's verified peer relationships in 2025 and 2026 establish him at the centre of a Northern UK and Irish dance music cluster that is one of the defining sonic stories of the current cycle.

Prospa is the most institutionally documented peer. Baker collaborated with the Leeds duo on "You Don't Own Me" (with vocalist RAHH) in June 2025, charted in the UK. The duo's debut album Free Your Mind released 5 June 2026 on CircoLoco Records, with Baker featuring on the You&Me Amnesia opening night b2b and on the Day Zero campground party at Coachella 2026 alongside KETTAMA. Omar+ is the second-strongest connection through the "Back It Up" collaboration. KETTAMA is the third, though Baker has not been verified in a 2026 Radio 1 b2b with the Galway DJ, the Coachella W2 Day Zero b3b session of KETTAMA + Prospa + Josh Baker (16 April 2026) confirms the three-act creative friendship as a real scene-level dynamic, not just a booking-pattern coincidence. Chris Stussy sits in the same orbit, and shared the Parklife 2026 bill.

The geographic story under those names is what gives the cluster its editorial shape. Prospa from Leeds. Baker from Manchester. KETTAMA from Galway. Omar+ from London. RAHH from Manchester. The M62 corridor (the East-West UK motorway connecting Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds) emerges across these collaborations as the spine of the current Northern UK rave-house revival. London is part of the conversation, but it is not the centre of it. That is a structural shift from previous UK dance cycles where London dominated, and it makes Baker's Manchester-rooted career more explanatory than incidental.

A producer-peer note

From a London producer's perspective, Baker's rise is interesting because it validates something many working artists already understand: infrastructure matters more than sudden visibility. London's UK garage rooms run in a parallel lane to the Manchester and Leeds house ecosystem around Baker, Prospa and Omar+: the same broader UK club world that Baker's 2026 Amnesia residency and Parklife main-stage slot arrived into at scale.

Why this matters now: the structural moment

Josh Baker's 2026 arrival is not a one-off. It is part of the same broader 2026 UK and European dance music reorganisation that is producing Sammy Virji's Alexandra Palace and Finsbury Park year, Prospa's CircoLoco debut album, Parklife's 2026 edition, and the long wait for Printworks to reopen. In every one of those stories, the underlying pattern is the same: producer-led infrastructure quietly built between 2014 and 2024 is being validated by industry capital, festival main-stage slots and global tour routing in 2026.

Baker's specific structural position inside that wave is the operator-artist hybrid. Most of the producers driving the 2026 cycle are artists who happen to run small labels or co-host event nights. Baker is the cleanest example of an artist who is simultaneously running a label (You&Me Records), a festival (Hide&Seek), an education platform (SYNTHO), and an internationally-touring DJ career, all four operating at the same time, in the same city, since the mid-2010s. By 2026, the institutional moment has caught up to the model.

The "delayed gratification" line Baker gave Ibiza Spotlight in July 2025 is the cleanest summary of how this happens. Most DJs in current dance music are optimised for short-arc visibility. Baker's career is optimised for long-arc compounding. The 2026 visibility (Amnesia, Parklife, DJ Mag) is the compounding finally arriving in the room. The work that produced it has been happening in Fallowfield, Cheshire, Manchester city centre and on Zoom video calls during lockdown for over a decade.

FAQ

Who is Josh Baker?

Josh Baker is a Manchester-based DJ, producer, label boss, festival co-founder and production educator. He runs You&Me Records and the You&Me event brand (since 2015), Hide&Seek Festival (since 2019), and SYNTHO production school (since approximately 2020). He was born and raised in Manchester, was 30 in January 2026 (MusicTech), won DJ Mag's Best of British Breakthrough Producer 2024, and has held his first Ibiza residency, You&Me at Amnesia, every Thursday since 2 July 2026.

Where is Josh Baker from?

Josh Baker is from Manchester, UK: DJ Mag calls him Manchester-born and The Mancunion says he was born and raised in the city. His early DJ years were rooted in Manchester clubs including Sankeys (where he says he fell in love with electronic music) and The Warehouse Project. The first You&Me parties happened at Koh Tao, a student bar in Fallowfield, Manchester, in 2015. He continues to be Manchester-based in 2026.

When does Josh Baker's Amnesia Ibiza residency start and end?

Josh Baker's You&Me residency at Amnesia Ibiza runs every Thursday from 2 July to 1 October 2026 on the Terraza, a 14-week takeover and his first Ibiza residency. The opening night on 2 July had Josh Baker b2b Prospa, with Cloonee, jWave b2b Job de Jong, and Yass & Mali. The closing party is on Thursday 1 October 2026, with Baker playing sunset and sunrise sets.

When did Josh Baker play Parklife 2026?

Josh Baker played Parklife 2026 on Saturday 20 June 2026 on The Valley main stage, with a published set time of 2:30pm to 4pm (per The Manc's Parklife stage splits). His slot was on the same day and stage as Sammy Virji, Skepta, Nia Archives, 4am Kru and Prospa. Full Parklife 2026 lineup analysis is in MNEEMO's Parklife 2026 piece.

What is You&Me Records?

You&Me Records is the record label and event brand founded by Josh Baker (with Kurt, Dan and Dash) in 2015 after a summer in Ibiza. The brand started as a Manchester party series at a Fallowfield student bar (Koh Tao) and grew into a label, festival (Hide&Seek) and Ibiza residency (Amnesia 2026). Notable You&Me Records releases include Baker's own Energy, Come Closer EP (December 2025), and the early YMD001 Various Artist compilation.

What is Hide & Seek Festival?

Hide & Seek Festival is the underground house, techno and disco festival co-founded and curated by Josh Baker. It launched on 31 August 2019 at Capesthorne Hall, Cheshire, and the Festical listing puts its capacity at about 5,000. Hide & Seek 2026 took place 24 to 26 July at Weston Park, Shropshire, across six stages.

What is SYNTHO?

SYNTHO is the music production education platform founded by Josh Baker in approximately 2020. Its website advertises 700+ music production courses, one-to-one track feedback and live classrooms. The platform is online-first and, by Baker's own account, grew out of production lessons he ran over Zoom during the pandemic lockdowns.

Did Josh Baker win a DJ Mag Best of British award?

Yes. Josh Baker won Breakthrough Producer at DJ Mag's Best of British Awards 2024, announced on 12 December 2024. The same year's awards saw Joy Orbison win Best DJ and PAWSA win Best Producer. DJ Mag returned to Baker for a longer feature, "Josh Baker: next in line," published on 26 August 2025.

How old is Josh Baker?

Josh Baker was 30 in January 2026, when MusicTech interviewed him, so he is 30 or 31 in autumn 2026. His exact date of birth has not been published. DJ Mag reports he was 19 during the month-long Ibiza villa stay that planted the idea for You&Me, which launched in 2015. He has said he started going to clubs around 16 and producing at 17.

Who are Josh Baker's main collaborators?

Josh Baker's verified 2025 and 2026 collaborations include Prospa (the Leeds duo Harvey Blumler and Guiorgi Smith, on "You Don't Own Me" featuring vocalist RAHH, released June 2025, charted on UK Official Singles Sales Chart at #21), Omar+ (on "Back It Up", UK No. 58), Poppy Baskcomb (on "My Place", UK No. 52), and a b3b with KETTAMA and Prospa at the Day Zero campground party during Coachella weekend two on 16 April 2026. He also features alongside KETTAMA and Chris Stussy across multiple international festival bills.

What does Josh Baker's sound actually sound like?

Per Baker himself: "It's for the dancefloor; it's fun, with groovy basslines, nice chords, fairly simple, not super intricate." His sound sits in the sweet spot between underground house credibility and radio-friendly accessibility, groove-heavy, club-functional, polished enough for DC-10 and Amnesia rooms but also Radio 1 daytime rotation. Tempo range typically 125 to 132 BPM. Less cerebral than minimal techno, less pop-structured than pure tech-house chart producers.

Where can I get Josh Baker tickets in 2026?

Parklife 2026 (Saturday 20 June) and Hide & Seek Festival (24 to 26 July, Weston Park) have already happened. The remaining You&Me date at Amnesia Ibiza is the closing party on Thursday 1 October 2026, with tickets listed from 80 euros on Amnesia's site. His two You&Me headline shows at The Warehouse Project in Manchester on Friday 2 and Saturday 3 October 2026 are sold out, and WHP advises against buying from third-party sites. For later dates, check Resident Advisor (ra.co), Skiddle and the official You&Me and Amnesia pages.

This editorial is part of House of MNEEMO's ongoing coverage of the electronic and club music scene, written by London-based DJ and producer MNEEMO, millions of streams to his name and a party series running through some of London's best clubs. Listen to MNEEMO: Spotify · Instagram · YouTube

Sources and verification: DJ Mag (Best of British 2024 winners, 12 December 2024, and winners' interviews; "Josh Baker: next in line", 26 August 2025; Come Closer EP December 2025), MusicTech (16 January 2026 interview, age and Parklife 2025), The Mancunion (9 October 2025, You&Me at The Warehouse Project), Mixmag (9 April 2019, Hide&Seek launch), Hide&Seek Festival official site (2026 dates and venue), Parklife official site (2026 thank-you message), Ibiza Spotlight (January, February and March 2026 residency reports; You&Me closing party listing), The Warehouse Project (You&Me Friday and Saturday event pages, 2 and 3 October 2026), SYNTHO official site, Official Charts Company (Josh Baker chart history), Flow Music (2018 Josh Baker interview), Ibiza Spotlight (July 2025 "DMC with You&Me mastermind"), We Rave You Tech (February 2026), Manchester's Finest (Hide & Seek coverage), Music Week (SYNTHO profile), Festival Insights (Parklife 2026 lineup), The Manc (Parklife 2026 stage splits), Skiddle (Hide & Seek and Amnesia listings), Manchester Confidential (April 2019 Hide & Seek launch), The Mancunion (June 2019 preview), Festival Voice (2021 Hide & Seek curation), MCR Pulse (Parklife G Stage trajectory), Amnesia official 2026 residency announcement and opening party page, BBC Radio 1 (Manchester legacy show), Apiko (SYNTHO case study, 2025 figures), Bandcamp / SoundCloud (You & Me Records catalogue), Apple Music / Spotify (release verification), Official Charts Company ("You Don't Own Me" chart history), Resident Advisor (ongoing tour-date listings), and Clashfinder (provisional running orders).