After the resounding success of Ninajirachi’s most recent EP, Girl EDM, she has taken the natural next step to create a f**king elite album, her first one at that!!! And what a treat. The broadened scope of an LP gives Nina the license to package together wistful storytelling, anthemic production and brutally abrasive breakdowns into performance-enhanced dance cuts that remind you that your eardrums are indeed functioning.  

I’m pleased and somewhat obliged to inform the reader that I had been sweating on this release for a couple of months, more so than any other. Nina makes my favourite kind of music – energetic, infectious and overstimulating to the point of near exhaustion after a couple of hours of listening in an otherwise mundane domestic environment. She chops up lyrics, drones out melodies and scissors her programmed drums and bass. If you’re not sure what scissoring means in this context, neither am I.

So if you’re short on attention, as you probably should be listening to Nina’s music, let me just tell you my favourites because god forbid then you’ll maybe listen to them! My out-and-out pick is ‘Battery Death’. The first chords sizzle off the mix and the synth sucks you straight into something like a sound vortex – as if a tiny person were slurped down a draining bubble bath. Nina wonders whether “we took it too far” but I would say no Nina you took it the perfect amount and made a perfectly formed creation for me to listen to. Thank you.

And then there are my other two favourites, ‘ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ' and ‘All I Am’, which together are gorgeously cohesive. The symbol kitty cat song finds Nina airing foregone expectations over a stripped back rhythm, projecting newfound autonomy over the doubts and regrets that used to overcome her, finally landing upon truth in the form of a demand: “choose me the way that I want it!” This resolution glides into an gleeful display of artistic singularity on the ______ ‘All I Am’. It is a sublime jab-hook, first laying plain her intentions and then breathlessly delivering on them, as if it weren’t already obvious that Ninajirachi plans to tow EDM into the future using her electronic vehicle (EV).

In spite of, or perhaps because of, the sensory overload that Nina’s sputtering bass drops yield, I feel like I Love My Computer actually has quite a lot to say about not just Ninajirachi the artist but Nina the computer-loving human. ‘iPod Touch’ paints quite a narratively rich picture that I resonate with: not necessarily because I personally recall a childhood of “high school front gate smoke in my face” or “beach day heat wave stoned and afraid”, having grown up in Naarm and choosing to save my lungs for sport, but because I did indeed have a shiny little iPod touch! With songs I would “put on when nobody’s home” like ‘Release Me’ by Agnes or ‘Bodies’ by Robbie Williams. And I challenge that few didn’t hide their little metallic pet underneath their pillow as their little escape late at night – in my case, after watching the ‘Get Shaky’ music video for the seventh night in a row.

There’s ‘Sing Good’: in a nutshell, her teacher didn’t like her music once during an assignment and, yeah, maybe there was a time she couldn’t sing that great. But just like a bricklayer with their trowel, Nina learnt the computer and now with it by her side she can indeed sing great. And then there are grizzlier tracks like ‘Fuck My Computer’ and ‘CSIRAC’ – curiously named after the pioneering Australian programming computer, which raises the question of whether these on-the-nose computer quips are passing references or if they are getting at something more meaningful. Although Ninajirachi lionises EDM as the creative wellspring from which she draws her unique sound, I Love My Computer positions her music more in conversation with an adjacent genre, one that earnestly embraced the power of a simple laptop for indoor kids with ideas galore, namely hyperpop. There is a SOPHIE DNA that snakes its way through the LP, and I’d wager it’s no coincidence that it is most prominent on the songs that most plainly draw their inspiration from the revolutionary, transcendental potential of computer music.

If I can speak to Nina for a second:

More from wherever this comes from please x

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Fedele De Campo

12 September 2025