Before Nina Wilson was Ninajirachi, she was a kid growing up in the small town of Kincumber on Australia’s central coast, dazzled by all the dance music she was learning about in her adventures on the family PC. Wilson went down Tumblr and YouTube rabbit holes, discovering dubstep at 12 and learning the ropes of the audio program FL Studio two years later. Now, as one of her country’s most exciting electronic artists, she’s released her debut album, ‘I Love My Computer’.
Between thrillingly kinetic bangers – like the pummelling ‘CSIRAC’, named for Australia’s first digital computer, and the unabashedly dubsteppy ‘Battery Death’ – the album looks back on the 25-year-old’s musical journey through her relationship with one of her most enduring partners and collaborators: her computer. “I’ll sit out on the balcony with my oldest friend,” she sings on the moving, biographical ‘Sing Good’, “The spirit in the room with me that carries my pen.”
“I wouldn’t have this career if it wasn’t for computer music,” Wilson tells NME over Zoom, her background set to a photo of three pigeons. “And no one taught me how to do it. I used my computer to learn how to use my computer.” Read on for our conversation with Ninajirachi about old Aussie dance music inspirations, shooting the gloriously chaotic album artwork, and why she hates ‘girl dinner’.
When NME first spoke to you, for an NME Australia cover story, we were talking to you around a mixtape, ‘Second Nature’. You said you take the album format seriously, and all your favorite albums are cohesive with stories and lore. So how did you set out to create ‘I Love My Computer’?
Ninajirachi: “I wanted to wait until I had done the groundwork and had enough resources to make the album that I really wanted to make. When I made ‘All I Am’, the first single for this album, that was the first time I had the inkling that I was ready and skilled and resourced enough to do it the way I wanted to. It wasn’t like I made that song and instantly was going about making ‘I Love My Computer’. I don’t think it was until December 2024 that I had the title and a bunch of songs that had this thread through them. Once I had the title and there seemed to be this theme emerging, it made it a lot easier to finish the rest of the tracks, because I had a scaffold, or at least a palette that was a bit of a north star.
“That’s something I’ve never been able to do with previous releases like the mixtape. That felt like a bunch of music lumped together, and obviously it had a title and a genre and such, but this was the first time I felt like I was doing everything with more intention than I’ve done before.”
It’s funny – our relationship with technology has changed so much that I don’t know if “I love my computer” is a statement that you’d find many people making now. When I first saw the title, I felt like there was a purity to that declaration that I don’t know is super common nowadays in 2025.
“Definitely. And it’s not all good – the song ‘Infohazard’ is about being scarred for life after seeing yucky stuff on social media out of nowhere. Sometimes you’re just scrolling and you’re like, ‘Oh god, I didn’t ask to see that, and now I can’t forget about it.’ But yeah, I was just thinking: what is my music about? Well, it’s all computer music. In every interview people ask ‘what gear do you use?’ And I’m like, nothing. I just use my laptop.
“I was like, wow, I really rely on it so much. I spend more time looking at it than I spend looking at any other person in my life. I wouldn’t have this career if it wasn’t for computer music, and no one taught me how to do it. I used my computer to learn how to use my computer. I realised I really love it and I’m so grateful to be alive in 2025 when that can be my life.”
“I’m really happy where I am now, so it’s not so much nostalgia in the sense of ‘I want to go back to that time when that was so much better’”
You mentioned ‘All I Am’, the first single. It felt to me like a throwback to this particular era of 2010s ‘throw your hands in the air’ kind of EDM. Were there any specific references or energy that you were trying to capture with that song?
“I didn’t go into that session thinking ‘I’m going to make the first single for my album’. It was just a jam at Ben Lee’s house in LA. I had just started touring America, and he was generously welcoming me into his circle and introducing me to other musicians. So he’d invited a bunch of his friends to his house, and we all had a jam. I was recording everything and producing it.
“I had been diving back into a lot of old Australian dance music, like Miami Horror, Pnau and Empire of the Sun, and other dance music from that time like Adrian Lux and Ladyhawke. That was just before I was a teenager, still in primary school and didn’t have access to blogs and stuff to learn about it at the time. I was getting really into that. In the session with Ben, maybe we had a break and a little microdose, and everyone was relaxed. I started looping and adding synths, and maybe subconsciously the Pnau influence from the weeks leading up leaked through.”
The sense I got from the record was there’s a fair bit of nostalgia on it. There’s a lot of reminiscing on ‘iPod Touch’ and ‘Sing Good’. You’re telling your life story and looking back. Does this feel like a nostalgic record to you?
“I feel like it’s more about looking back at what has led me to where I am now. I’m really happy where I am now, so it’s not so much nostalgia in the sense of ‘I want to go back to that time when that was so much better.’ It’s more a look at my life and my circumstances. I’m not from a white collar family or a family that has any artists or musicians in it. I’m from a small town and I’m a girl producer – there were just all of these little things that I was like, ‘This maybe shouldn’t have worked, but I’m really happy to be here and have people care about what I do’.”
Matching the maximalist music is a really eye-popping, intricate album cover. What was that like to shoot? I imagine that took a while to set up. Or maybe you just live like that, I don’t know.
“That’s what’s funny: when I posted it, there were a lot of comments that were just like, ‘oh my god, girl, clean your room, how do you live like this?’ And I definitely don’t live like that. I can’t handle when there’s mess on the floor. For anyone reading, don’t worry, that’s not my room all the time.
“I had a few different album cover ideas, and the one I kept coming back to was the messy computer desk or computer hutch, which looks like a shrine or the bedroom, because that’s the place where I always am with my computer, where I make all my music. That was the imagery that I was inspired by. My friend Aria [Zarzycki], who also made the ‘Infohazard’ and ‘iPod Touch’ videos and shot some of the single art, was in Australia and came over to shoot the cover. It’s all stuff from my room and around my house, just whatever I had. It took four or five hours to set up. Luckily it was actually in my house, so we could leave it for multiple days. We really got to play with it. Once we had the right photo, she spent like a hundred hours editing it as well, adding in easter eggs and little Photoshop bits. It took us another five hours to pack it down, but we got it done.”
My last question is: what’s your least favourite meme?
“Oh my god. I hate so many of them. I’m trying to think of something I really hate. Maybe anything to do with ‘I’m just a girl’: like, ‘girl dinner’ and ‘girl math’, because it makes girls look really dumb and incompetent. I know it’s ironic, but it still doesn’t sit right with me. I feel like the irony is gone too far around now that it’s like, ‘OK, guys, we’re a bit above that’. But no shade. If people find that funny, that’s cool. It’s just not my thing.”
Do you worry about ‘girl EDM’ being misread in a similar way? [‘girl EDM’ is the title of a 2024 Ninajirachi EP, and the URL of her website.]
“Yes, actually, I have worried about that. Some people have thrown that in, because it was all around the same time as that cultural movement or whatever you’d call it, but it’s so not that to me. It did start as a joke, but the joke was that me and four other girls were all playing an EDM show together, and there was one male in the green room, and that was my manager. We were like, ‘this is so funny and silly. We’re at the girl EDM show. Why aren’t there any boys here?’ We weren’t trying to make ourselves sound or look dumb. We were celebrating it. So yeah, I’m not trying to lump it with that kind of humour, but to anyone who’s interpreted it that way, no shade. That’s so fine. I’m not pressed. But yeah, different origins.”
Ninajirachi’s ‘I Love My Computer’ is out now on NLV Records.