Ninajirachi Just Dropped One of the Year’s Best Dance Albums: ‘I’m Excited to Be Alive at the Time of Internet Music’

Ninajirachi knew she was writing music about a deep relationship, but she was also aware that her songs weren’t about a romantic interest, or a friend, a parent or a pet. Eventually, she realized they were about her laptop.

And why not, given how much time the Australian producer has spent with the effectively sentient machine, a constant companion that connected her to a world of music then made it possible for her to make her own? “No one in the world knows me better,” she sings on her cheekily but tellingly titled track “I Want to F–k My Computer.”

The song is a centerpiece of I Love My Computer, the debut Ninajirachi album released on Aug. 8 via NLV Records. Much like its maker, the 12-track project is smart, stylish and ebullient, with a bit of edge and a lot of observations on living and loving in our computer world.

With the album, the 26-year-old Australian producer/songwriter/singer steps further into a spotlight she’s been carving out for years with her musical releases, her Dark Crystal party series that happen in Australia and increasingly big and continent-spanning shows in Australia, Asia, Europe and North America. These include a turn on the EDC Las Vegas mainstage during her debut at the festival this past May and a recent three-show run supporting one of her musical heroes, Porter Robinson, on his Australia tour this past February. Her own biggest U.S. tour to dates starts on Sept. 5, with six of the 17 shows already sold out.

“I don’t feel like I entirely fit in in the EDM world,” she says. “I don’t entirely fit in in the Australian dance thing, so I’m happy to just do my thing and whoever likes it can come and check it out.”

The name Ninajirachi has been in the dance world zeitgeist since the artist was a highschooler named Nina Wilson in Gosford, New South Wales, a town with approximately 4,800 residents – a population smaller than some of the crowds she’d eventually play for. It was in her bedroom in Gosford that she discovered electronic music over the internet, falling for artists like Robinson, Flume and more during the EDM golden age.

“I feel really excited to be alive at the time of internet music that feels like it’s everywhere,” she says.

She began uploading her productions to SoundCloud when she was 16, with one of the tracks catching the attention of taste-making Australian radio host, DJ and label owner Nina Las Vegas, who put Ninajirachi’s “Pure Luck” into heavy rotation on the country’s influential radio station Triple J. Ninajirachi was a 2016 and 2017 finalist in Triple J’s Unearthed High competition, which sought out the best talent among Australian high schoolers.

The two Ninas eventually met IRL when Las Vegas was speaking on a panel and Ninajirachi was in the audience. “She said hello to me, but I didn’t know if it was because she was really saying hello to me or just being polite to this girl who was ogling her,” Ninajirachi says now. It was the former. Nina Las Vegas later sent a message saying they should meet for coffee and make music together.

“I went to her apartment, and we made a song that ended up being on her EP, and we just kept doing sessions and having coffees,” Ninajirachi says. “I’d made my first EP, and I was showing it to her, and she was like, ‘Oh, do you want me to put it out?’ I was like, ‘Yes, that would be crazy cool.”

This project, Lapland, came out in 2019, with all of Ninajirachi’s subsequent releases also dropping via NLV Records. In 2019, Ninajirachi signed with Matt Downey of Seven20 for management.

“It’s like a small team, and NLV Records is independent, so it’s usually just me, Matt, Nina and [visual collaborator] Aria [Zarzycki] in a group chat, like ‘AHHH!’” she jokes of the general pace of things.

While the subsequent years contained many career building blocks (including a 2023 collab with ISOxo on his excellent kidsgonemad! album) Ninajirachi says she really felt the momentum shift this past March after a run of Australian headlining sets. She played her then unreleased single “All I Am” during each of these shows, which created a subsequent surge of support for the track when it dropped on February 25. The song now has nearly two million streams on Spotify alone, marking her biggest release on the streamer to date.

This momentum was buoyed by Ninajirachi’s slot on the lineups for Australia’s touring festival Laneway, which she played all four editions of in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide this past February. Charli xcx was the festival’s headliner, with Ninajirachi feeling that Charli fans “might just like my music.” The same was true when she’d played the three shows supporting Robinson, a move that not only satisfied her teenage self, but exposed her to likeminded fans.

“I found that even some of his fans outside of Australia have discovered my music just from me being on the poster, which is really cool.” she says. “His fans are so loyal, and they seem to get into whatever he shows them.”

The momentum all lead up to the release of I Love My Computer earlier this month, with the project marking a creative cohesion of sounds and concepts for the producer. “I didn’t want to just make a bunch of music and slap a title on it and call that my first album,” Ninajirachi says. “I love albums, and my favorite albums feel like they have a big visual identity and so much great world-building and lore and you can make an elevator pitch about what they’re about. I just didn’t feel like I had an idea for an album, until I made this one.”

This idea is simultaneously personal and universal, as Ninajirachi uses the music to explore her own musical awakening via the songs and scenes she found on the internet, speaking to the experiences we all simultaneously had by ourselves and together while discovering and sharing music online “It sounds like iPod Touch, little crack in thе screen/FL Studio so late, I fell asleep on the kеys/With it looping through the speakers, bleedin’ into my dreams,” Ninajirachi sings on “iPod Touch,” a brightly thumping confection of a track about the thrill of finding a song that changes your whole world.

While making the album, she stayed conscious of how the music would play during her live sets, roadtesting the songs to make sure they worked as well live as they did in the studio.

“During the pandemic I was making music and not thinking about it,” she says. “Then coming out of COVID, some of the songs were so hard to play live. It’d like like, ‘That didn’t really work’ and I’d go back and change them.” Now, she finds some of the album’s songs work even better live that they do during at home listenable, although her goal was to make all of them “hum-alongable.”

Her melodies will get stuck in your head, with their staying power and live impact drawing an increasingly large community into the Ninajirachi world. She’s playing five sold-out shows in Australia through the end of August, touring the U.S. next month and then has another round of shows in Australia and the United States through the end of 2025 and into next year.

Her goals now are to keep blowing out these shows and to eventually to make another album, a process she found “demanding, but so much more rewarding than demanding.” A lifelong gamer, she’s done collabs with Sega, the fictional singer Hatsune Miku and Fortnite and would love to do more projects in this world. Given how much she’s already achieved and the pace with which she’s growing, these goals seem likely to be achieved, and will deservedly bring more fans into her orbit.

“I don’t feel like I’ve had this many people caring about my music before, which feels really cool, and it’s also kind of scary,” she says. “I keep getting really kind messages and comments from people who are excited for the album. All the vinyl already sold out. I’m really nervous, because I hope people like it. But I mean, I think it’s good.”