James Barry doesn’t really fit the profile of someone with 14 million streams. He spent the first stretch of his music career in near-total privacy, writing songs in Australian bedrooms that nobody heard, not knowing where to start or who to show them to. The project he eventually built, link3, came together slowly and mostly alone, and it still sounds that way.
He grew up across several Australian cities, claims Canberra as his reluctant hometown, and made a lot of his earlier music on the Gold Coast, mixing tracks with a view of the Surfer’s Paradise skyline out the window. “I’m grateful to my roommates for putting up with it,” he says. Then came Montreal, and things shifted. “Montreal is truly a beautiful city that I owe a lot to, and if you want to see a gig, there are multiple to choose from any night of the week. I really believe it is a golden age area for young people who want to be part of a scene. It’s made the whole process feel so much more ‘real’, and interacting with people every day about each other’s music is very inspiring and has made me take the project way more seriously. Barfly, Turbohaus, Hemisphere, Blue Dog, La Sala Rossa, Sot, Casa, Barbossa — all those places are just incredible; Saint Laurent is the best.”
The term “slowcore revival” wasn’t his. It came from a 2024 piece by Michelle Hyun Kim that mentioned link3, and it stuck. Barry takes it as fair. “I was trying to make simple tracks that stung, and I often failed, and maybe I felt like there was some hope missing, or maybe that’s something intrinsic to who I am and that naturally came out sometimes in my songwriting.” The record that set the whole thing in motion was Duster’s Stratosphere. “Like almost everyone, Stratosphere by Duster really moved me and was transformative to my song-creation process and pursuit to create lo-fi indie.”
The guitar came during COVID. Barry had nothing better to do than sit with it for hours. “A lot of my songs come from sessions like that, just subconsciously playing, learning, and experimenting. It’s very meditative.” He points to Noel Gallagher’s idea that the song is already in the guitar, you just have to bring it out. “That was something that stuck with me during that initial Covid era.” Nearly six years later, he says he still does it the same way.
The early shape of link3 owes a lot to Liam McCay, whose alias Birth Day hit Barry like a confirmation of something he hadn’t yet managed to articulate. “It was a bit of an epiphany moment, realizing that the path that I wanted to create, or the sound I was trying to manifest, had already been perfectly encapsulated by Liam, and at such an early point in his career.” At the time, Barry didn’t own an electric guitar or any recording equipment. McCay helped him produce early tracks, including “Blue-Eyes White Dragon,” and laid the drums down on “Bother You,” a song that would eventually pass seven million streams. “He proved to me how powerful and complex ‘simple’ can be and that there is something sonically hypnotic in a tightly curated simplicity. You can listen to it on repeat for hours.”
That instinct for compression runs all through On the Outline, link3’s debut proper, released in January 2026. Fifteen tracks, many of them under two minutes, recorded entirely on a single SM57 in Barry’s Saint Laurent apartment and analogue mastered in Los Angeles. On the question of song length, Barry is direct. “I just want to take the best minute from a four-minute song and refine that minute into a full track, if that makes sense. I really enjoy trying to be precise and get something that can be looped, with as few dull moments as possible, but it’s easier said than done.”
The recording method was a choice, not a compromise. Barry had been in a proper LA studio and worked in a DIY band environment before coming back to the apartment and the SM57. “It made me realize that I find it easier to put together something cohesive and unique when I make the process insular and restrict my options.” He’s quick to note the irony: “link3 is also extremely collaborative, and I’ve loved working with a band and working with other musicians, and I plan to continue doing that.”
The album moves between grief and something close to wonder. Barry, living far from home, finds that loss hits hardest in the good moments. “Every time I’ve lost something, it comes to my mind in my happiest moments, like when I’m watching my friends play an incredible show, or playing pool after a fun gig, or when it’s really beautiful outside and I’m getting coffee, or stuff like that. Those are often the times I feel the most grief, and when things are so nice, and beautiful, and I feel so lucky, the absence feels more devastating. It’s hard to articulate, but I think that’s why the album bounces around between those feelings; I don’t think loss and gain are that different.”
Since 2024, link3 has been a duo. Sunniva joined as lead vocalist, and the change has been significant. “Being able to write songs without stressing about how I’m going to edge my vocals onto it has been incredibly liberating,” Barry says. He doesn’t hold back on what he thinks of her. “She has the most beautiful, naturally gifted voice I have ever heard, and she sings as easily as breathing air. If I could sing like that, I’d never stop. The fact she’s blowing up on YouTube and everything now doesn’t surprise me at all, and I am very glad I am on the team. She will be infinitely bigger than link3 in no time, and she pretty much already is. She really has all the markers of a star, and right now she basically is a little star; it’s crazy. I am a lucky man.”
As the audience has grown, Barry has kept the writing itself unchanged. “At the end of the day, when I am writing my music, it’s when I am alone playing guitar, 95% of the time at least. Keeping the core of the songwriting insular, I think, is my strategy for keeping it intimate.”
The next album is another matter. He’s thinking bigger: a proper studio, a serious producer, strings, piano, maybe flute. “We are going to go very hard and try to make something considerably more dense than OTO. I’d love to record the album in one big two-week go in some studio in America or here in Montreal with a producer who has made one of my favourite albums, something more analogue maybe. Lots of piano, lots of strings, maybe some flute, and I’ll take some singing and piano lessons to sharpen up and get dramatic. Then maybe tour the US, which is where the most fans are, or get back home to Australia? We will have to see.”
He doesn’t seem in any rush to figure it out. The apartment is still there. The SM57 is still there. And for now, that’s enough.
