There is something strangely sincere about calling an album “I Love My Computer”. For many born just before Y2K or just after the new millennium, computers were part of your childhood. As technology expanded, so did your online experiences. The computer became a venue for formative moments: music becoming personal when you downloaded albums for the first time, finding new communities to discuss Lost fan theories, or watching the first generation of viral videos at the dawn of YouTube. The computer and online culture were gateways to the world and shaped identity, an identity forged in the hours spent discovering new artists on Limewire, curating your top 8 on MySpace, or, for some, becoming digital creators. This is the internet Ninajirachi speaks of on I Love My Computer.
It’s a dance record that reads like the diary of someone reflecting on the formative years of her “iPod Touch with a crack in the screen” or chronicling high school via posts they know they will delete. Yet I Love My Computer is more than nostalgia for the old internet. It’s a showcase of digital-native storytelling, an album made by someone for whom their computer and the internet weren’t simply technologies that arrived later in life; they were part of the culture that shaped her identity.
EDM and electronic music are inseparable from technology. Whether it was Kraftwerk creating soundscapes in the 1970s or modern DJs spinning in Ibiza, electronic music has always had a soundtrack built around the latest technology. Ethereal synths, microsamples, heavy drum machines, and sophisticated production software not only made electronic music possible but completely shaped its vocabulary. Daft Punk embraced technology from their maximalist house tracks on 2001’s Discovery to even donning robot personas. Justice pushed online culture and EDM further, with 2007’s Cross creating an overlap of EDM and rock ‘n’ roll, driven equally by dance clubs and downloads. Within a few years, Skrillex tracks were blasting through Call of Duty montages, and SoundCloud was spreading dubstep to every corner of cyberspace.
Ninajirachi didn’t grow up with these influences already formed and crystallized within the EDM scene. She grew up as these niche scenes became accessible through the connective tissue of chat rooms, comment sections, and a growing social media landscape. Ninajirachi wasn’t discovering the internet; she was discovering herself through its eras.
“I want to fuck my computer. ‘Cause no one in the world knows me better,” she sings. It’s a bold statement for the third track on I Love My Computer. The line “no one in the world knows me better” rings true to the album’s central thesis. Early internet nostalgia is beginning to show in 2026, as people look back to the early days of Flash games and AIM. Yet it’s more than nostalgia on I Love My Computer. It’s the shared feeling of those who logged on.
Tracks like “iPod Touch” create a musical memory, with lines like “sounds like iPod Touch, yellow Pikachu case. FL Studio free download in my search history. Hidden underneath my pillow ’cause I should be asleep” punctuating the coming-of-age-in-a-digital-age kind of songwriting. How with her iPod touch she could “Turn a Monday to a memory and change my world.” The bittersweet nostalgia weaves throughout the record, always within the thesis that those digital daydreams formed her music. It’s more than nostalgia; it’s core memories shaped by the device that “knows” her.
Yet even within nostalgia cycling and core memories, I Love My Computer balances the days of dial-up with modern online fluency. Tracks like “CSIRAC” sound like a Y2K club mix, but “It’s You” could flow seamlessly into a Porter Robinson or Madeon DJ set. As much as Ninajirachi borrows from her online adolescence, her music still finds the pulse of modern EDM, hyperpop, and TikTok-era immediacy. “Battery Death” invokes classic dubstep with a breezy melody. “London Song” feels in step with brat as hyperpop and British club music verge into modern EDM. And “Delete” discusses the insecurity and vulnerability of posting a story just so an ex-lover will see it.
All these songs are incredibly online, if you will, but each comes from a different corner of digital culture. I Love My Computer isn’t a pure vaporwave throwback or an attempt to recreate the 2008 era; it takes each era of the web and each era of EDM and puts them in 2020s context.
Message boards never went away; they just evolved. They became Reddit, Tumblr, Discord, Twitch, and even Patreon communities. I Love My Computer showcases that evolution not just in its lyrics but also in its themes and storytelling. Message boards were a mixtape of culture and ideas: inside jokes, collaboration, sincerity, irony, sometimes trauma, sometimes bliss, and above all, community. Just like a message board, I Love My Computer pulls from subcultures and influences to create a portrait of the internet.
Suddenly a song could contain traces of EDM heroes, anime openings, meme culture, club music, YouTube references, and gaming lore, without any explanation of why they all belong together. They belong because the internet has taught audiences to make those connections for decades. It turned the phrase “chronically online” into a personal Rosetta Stone for the internet lexicon. The more online you are, the more I Love My Computer translates into the language ingrained in your soul.
What makes I Love My Computer at home in the 2020s is how it treats her computer. Each track tells a different side of online culture and community, all achieved through the same device. The album becomes less possible the further back one goes in time. By the mid-2020s, a computer is a jukebox, television, library, gaming console, social life, recording studio, and connection to everything, everywhere. Previously, social media or online relationships got name-checks in songs, ranging from Aaron Carter‘s “Internet Girl” to “Online” by Brad Paisley to “Internet Friends” by Knife Party, and now songs discovered purely on TikTok.
Yet, I Love My Computer makes the computer a central character; an intimate part of the music itself. The album cover is a slew of computers, monitors, wires, old video game cartridges, and keyboards. Ninajirachi sits at the center, surrounded by the sea of speakers and anime posters. It’s an introduction before the opening ever hits. From the title to the cover to a track titled with only a catface emoji, the record signals to the audience that it’s completely obsessed not just with her computer, but with the culture computers offer.
Yet it’s not just a record about always being online or purely “TikTok Music”. I Love My Computer represents something deeper: the internet as an influence and a commentary on how culture changes through an online population. While vinyl has made a comeback, music discovery began leaving record stores with Napster and has become increasingly online ever since. Even vinyl champions like Fonoflow and Third Man Records have Instagram accounts. TikTok, like early message boards and record stores, is a place for conversation and a legitimate cultural force.
Indeed, social media opens borders of discovery, allowing artists to pull influences from across the globe. It changes how listeners and artists alike understand genre, communicate with one another, and conceptualize nostalgia. In a polycultural world, the internet allows fans to retain a sense of shared culture, even if it’s more niche than ever. I Love My Computer pushes against the oversimplifications about people finding music online, instead showcasing the experience of a musician born online.
The idea of music born online elevates I Love My Computer beyond internet nostalgia; Ninajirachi doesn’t say “I remember the internet”; instead, the record asks the listener to wonder how growing up online molds us. Many digital creators tell this story through deep-dive video essays or books that break down changing online culture, but Ninajirachi tells it through sound. The textures on “CSIRAC” feel like an old flash game; the melodies on “Delete” evoke Obama-era EDM; the lyrics on “iPod Touch” are flashbacks to young YouTube. “London Song” feels at home on a modern dance floor. It’s a complete collision of older digital memory and modern club sound.
I Love My Computer forgoes traditional narrative or concept-album structure, creating a sonic story of those who grew up as the internet grew. Instead of telling the story of kids “raised by TV”, Ninajirachi takes the next step, showing the bittersweet bliss, the inside jokes, the core memories, and cat memes of the kids “raised by the internet.”
As time surges on, the echoes of the early internet are still felt, just evolved. The DNA of Limewire still lives in music streaming. YouTube went from skateboarding dogs to teens finding careers, then to adults building viable careers as YouTubers. iPods became iPhones. The internet stopped being a place you went and became everything, and those early experiences and echoes remain encoded in the culture produced by those who grew up with them.
What makes I Love My Computer so compelling isn’t that it’s a love letter to digital culture; it’s the story of what it meant to grow up online—having formative experiences under the glow of the monitor and hum of the desktop. It’s the story of humor through memes, love through selfies, and taste built by message boards. Ninajirachi isn’t making music for the internet. She’s telling the internet’s story one beat at a time.