By Zelenny Lozano / Pink B
Fall is in the air as I line up outside The Parish in downtown East Austin. It’s the last Friday night of September, the end of a draining week at the end of a busy month full of unprecedented current events, a tumultuous political landscape, uncertainty about the future, and the usual end-of-fiscal-year grind (for those of us employed in the corporate world).
I was looking forward to leaving all that behind for one late night at Ninajirachi’s North American I Love My Computer tour in Austin. I fell in love with her debut album of the same name just a month prior, when it turned a random August Friday into a memory and “changed my world,” as Nina sings in the album’s lead single “iPod Touch”.
Since its release on August 7, I Love My Computer has become a critically acclaimed album, receiving eight ARIA award nominations and cementing Ninajirachi as the freshest face of Australian electronic music. The album’s impact has also traveled beyond her home country to a worldwide audience, as evidenced by a sold-out North American tour and a spot on the 2026 Coachella festival lineup.
It’s no surprise this project has reached such a wide audience, given its central themes about growing up chronically online during the internet’s earliest years. Though several tracks make specific references to Nina’s life growing up in a small coastal town in Australia, the feeling of discovering the world and finding belonging in the unregulated Wild West of the early internet goes beyond geographic boundaries, particularly for her generation.
Although Nina was born in 1997, I Love My Computer resonated deeply with my experiences as a millennial just a couple years short of a Gen Z classification, raised by my brick-like HP laptop, my iPod nano, and my Nintendo DS alone in my room. The audience at Ninajirachi’s stop in Austin skewed younger than her (and much younger than me), consisting mostly of college-aged students that were excitedly chatting about “semesters” and “majors” while waiting for the venue’s doors to open.
The show began with sets by two Austin-based producer/DJs: 45AM and MEA CULPA, one of my favorite performers I caught at this year’s Babestock festival. Though this was self-admittedly “the largest crowd [she’s] ever played for,” MEA CULPA hyped up the crowd with a mix of original tracks and energetic remixes of old favorites like “Hollaback Girl,” “Vroom Vroom,” and “Whatcha Say.” California-based Syzy was the final opener of the night, and she dialed up the energy of the crowd even further with her dubstep-infused sound and bouncing-off-the-walls style.
(From left to right) 45AM, MEA CULPA, and Syzy open for Ninajirachi
With the audience adequately energized, Ninajirachi took the stage with a modified rendition of her track, “London Song,” replacing the original lyrics of “I’ve never been to London” with “I’ve never been to Austin, Texas.” She played nearly every track from her I Love My Computer album, expertly teasing the next track and seamlessly blending the tracks into each other. During the popular track “**** My Computer,” the audience chanted along to the chorus in a cathartic manner: “I WANT TO ****, MY COMPUTER!” Since Nina has played for mostly Australian audiences in the past, she’s noted on social media that hearing the American pronunciation of “comput-er” (as opposed to “comput-ah”) has been novel and humorous to her.
Ninajirachi playing her debut album, I Love My Computer at The Parish in Austin, TX
She played the most popular track from her album, “iPod Touch,” towards the beginning of the set—but eventually played it one more time when the audience chanted for an encore at the end of the show. A mosh pit erupted in the center of the crowd during this final song, while everyone else released their final dance moves of the night.
I purchased the tour T-shirt and the physical CD, of course!
In that moment, I was able to escape from my current state of existential dread caused by a draining work week, a strained economy, chaotic current events, and every other aspect of adult life in 2025. For the duration of Nina’s last song of the night, I was alone in my room with my computer in 2006, falling in love with music for the first time.