Hi, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, Internet's busiest music nerd. As you can see, my IRL guest today for this special interview is none other than Ninajirachi. Her newest project, I Love My Computer, is out now. But yes, one of my favorite electronic music albums of the year. We're going to talk about this record and anything else that comes up in this conversation.

Anthony: Nina, thank you for coming out and making the time.

Ninajirachi: No, thank you so much for having me. This is really cool. I'm glad it worked out.

How's the tour been going so far?

It's been awesome. I mean, we're done now for America. We go home tomorrow for the year, but there's more America next year, starting in January. So it's still going, but the first leg is done. And it was so awesome. I kept saying to my team who I'm traveling with, not long ago, any one of these shows might have been the best show of my life, but they've all have just been so fantastic. And the fans and the people coming have been so kind. And yeah, it's been crazy.

So you're adjusting to the fame. You're adjusting to the limelight a little bit. Is that what you're saying?

N: No, I mean, I just mean I'm not used to the energy being... I'm not used to having people know all the songs and sing all the songs and have the energy be so high, consistently through the set. It's just really new, and it's the way I've always wanted my shows to be.

How do you feel like maybe going forward that could impact, I don't know, just the way that you view your creative process in general and the way that you just present yourself? Because It seems like a lot of your earlier stuff and even the way you're putting yourself out there on the cover of the new album. Everything that you do is coming from this really intimate personal space. I'm in my room, I'm surrounded by all my stuff. I'm just vibing with my clutter. And now what you're doing is making waves out there in the real world in a way to where I'm sure it no longer feels like it's just online, and it's just a digital thing. You're now being confronted in a big way with just the reality and the impact of what you're doing. Has that shift been a wake-up call or been shocking?

Yeah, it's definitely been surprising, especially because, like you said, a lot of the music is about myself, and I was only really thinking I'm thinking about myself when I made it. When you're super... A lot of what I made the music about is experiences I had when I was real young. When you're that young, you're not aware of the world, and you think everything's just happening to you. And then so having the music come out and seeing comments on the videos or whatever being like, "Oh, I also experienced that." It's really cool. It makes me feel less alone as well, honestly. But I think also the shows... I made a lot of this album with the shows in mind. After having toured, especially in America for a year or two now, before making this album, I had more of a sense of what music I wanted to present at shows. And then that informed making the music, which informed the way the shows were set up. And they're a lot more together than I think they were before. So, yeah, I don't know if that makes sense.

No, it does. Getting into the music that you make beyond, I guess, the usual genre tags that I and many people have put onto it, I mean, get a little bit into whatever you could call the girl EDM ethos. Is this something akin to what people maybe online would frame as like, girl DINNER, or girl THIS, or girl THAT, or is it like some other completely different thing?

I actually hope it's a different thing because I don't know if I really like the self-depreciating girl joke.

I mean, It's not a self-effacing label. It's something else.

No, definitely not. And no shade to anyone's humor for people who—

No shade anybody having girl DINNER right now while watching this. We don't want anyone to feel guilty over their meal as they're watching this.

[laughs] Absolutely not. Eat what you want. But I think, yeah, the girl EDM came from, it was actually my first headline show in LA last year, and the lineup was me, and Magna Carter, Izzy Kamina, and DJ Dave. And the green room was all girls. I think Matt, my manager, was the only boy in the whole green room, and we were just joking about how… I feel like we're at an EDM show, and it's all girls here, and that doesn't really happen. So we were just joking that it was the girl EDM show. It stuck, and we just kept using it as a joke. I had an EP that needed a title, and that felt like the right title for the music. I think I put something on my story like, "I'm going to release some girl EDM." And that was before it was the title, and a lot of people replied to it. And I just went with what the people seem to want, I guess.

I mean, labeling your music in that way and also sing about these personal and sometimes very quiet experiences that you're referencing in the songs, the way you're portraying yourself on the cover. I mean, you were referencing this earlier, but getting into it further, are you seeing that there are a lot of people getting into the music because they directly relate to the stories that you're telling and the lifestyle that you were living at one point as a young person who was maybe just, I don't know, looking back at it retrospectively online quite a bit and exploring the world through that portal?

Yeah, definitely. I don't think that my album and what I'm saying with it is necessarily super new or ground-breaking. People have said I've said that before or whatever. But maybe it's in the last few years, the first time my generation has been old enough to look back on their life and say something about it. So, yeah, it's cool. Like I said before, when you're a kid, you just think that you're the only one in the world who's playing this video game right now because the people immediately around you aren't playing it. And you don't know that there's a whole other a lot of people that are... And I wasn't really online like that as a kid. I wasn't really on social media till I was in high school, which in Australia is from 12 years old. I know it's different in the US. But my online usage as a kid-kid was more just a bit of YouTube and game forums, like looking up how to beat this part of the game. You know what I mean? So I wasn't interfacing with other real people and realizing that we were all having the same experience. It wasn't until getting older and then making these songs, and especially on the "iPod Touch" video, because that song is probably the most nostalgia-baity on the whole album, or "InfoHazard" even. They're the most literally about experiences I had when I was younger. There's some really sweet comments on there about people who feel seen by me making music about that experience.

There's some TikTok trends now that are saying the iPod is coming back. The iPod and the iPod Touch. People are favoring that over the wide access to everything that they get through streaming, and instead, focusing more on personalizing things to their taste and wanting to rein things in a little bit.

Yeah, well, totally. That's why it was so huge for me, I think, because I had an hour trip to school every day on the bus, and I didn't have the Internet, and I just had the songs that were on my device. And you get to know the music so intimately because it's all you have access to, and you just listen to the same music for an hour, and then you'll go home and change the songs over if you have time. But then if you don't, you're listening to the same songs the next day. So the music, when you spend that much time with it, seeps so much deeper into your brain versus just skipping to the next thing that you have. Obviously, it's awesome. Now I love being able to have the Internet all the time and discover everything and stuff. But there was something special about that, so I get why it's coming back.

Yeah, but I mean, digging into that more, as much as your album is about the internet, it's about technology, especially during that adolescent era, I feel like on the songs you do express feelings and thoughts that come across, you're almost poking fun at the way this stuff is seeped into every element of our lives, or you express even a little bit of skepticism about how present it is in all of our lives, even with "Fuck My Computer", which obviously it seems like you're just being so over the top, so hyperbolic. Do you feel like there are moments where you sit there and check yourself and just think like, "Man, maybe I'm putting a bit too much of myself in my computer and I need to reel it back," or "I need to hide some things, or not share everything," or just limit the amount of time and presence this technology has in my life on an on an everyday basis?

Yeah, I think so. I probably feel more positively about it than not, though. There's definitely times... I mean, "Fuck My Computer" is more about making music as well, I think. The idea from it came because I had an idea in my head, and I couldn't use Ableton fast enough. I couldn't get it out as fast as I wanted, and I felt like I was losing it, and I couldn't transcribe quick enough. And I thought, if I just could be one with this laptop right now, it would just be there, and it would be a perfect literal translation. And that was where the idea for that song came from. But yeah, I don't know if I have ever felt super negatively about it or I need to reel it back, because a lot of the idea with this music was that I feel so grateful to live in this time and live this life where I get to do this stuff, and I couldn't do it without my computer. There's definitely moments, like in the last song, there's a lyric that's like, "I'm always at the desk in the dark, because I just spend so much time with my laptop." But I think it's cool. Honestly, I've been on tour for a month and I've hardly touched it. So it's been a nice break.

Because you're out in the real world.

Exactly. Yeah. But it's cool because now I miss it and I'm ready to go back and make music again.

You're ready to be chilling back in front of the computer again by yourself.

Yeah, exactly. But I feel honestly more positively about it than the negative. And maybe because I feel like I share a healthy amount of myself, and it's mostly a music making and discovery device.

Where do you feel like you sit in the midst of all the debates going on right now in terms of how much we see technology, the computer AI as well, stepping into the creative process and people just generating songs, whole cloth out of nowhere. I mean, obviously, you do take some joy or you feel some appreciation on a song like "Sing Good", for example, where you're like, "Yeah, I don't sing great, maybe, but the fact that I have this tool here and the ability to do X and Y and Z allows me to make the music I want to make and express myself in the way that I want to express myself."

Obviously, I'm sure you've experienced either online or in-person. You have your purists out there who are like that thumping, grinding, pulsating EDMs, it's not music. It's not this, it's not that, unless it has some bullshit like [EDM noises]. So I mean, obviously, there are people who have closed themselves off in that way. But then there are people who obviously see a lot of merit in what you do, but don't see a lot of validity behind a lot of the AI art and images and music that we see proliferating on the Internet now.

Where do you feel like that boundary is for you in terms of how much technology can encroach upon the creative process, how involved it should be before it starts to maybe lose maybe what we perceive to be as the soul behind the song or the music?

Yeah, totally. I definitely want to say that there was no AI used.

I didn't think so. I didn't think so. But thank you for specifying.

No, of course. There's no AI music on it.

No slop on this album. No slop at all.

[laughs] I think I worked too hard to let that be a speculation. Even the cover art, a few people have been like, "Is this any of this generative fill?" It's definitely not.

One of the things I love about the cover art is that it does look like one of those weird images that trick you out on the internet, where it's like, look at this and see if you could recognize a thing.

That was a reference. Yeah.

It does look like one of those at first, but then you actually can dive into it and look at each individual item throughout. And we could talk more about the different references and bits throughout it. But where do you feel like that breaking point is for you in terms of how much technology gets involved in your creative process?

Yeah. Well, I mean, with AI, there's the copyright and environmental issues. All of that aside, I think that the saddest thing about it in terms of making music is the most fun thing about making music is bumbling around and making mistakes and not knowing what you're doing and just making a bunch of rubbish and then put it... I don't know. For me, making music is collaging just different things from my life. All of the exciting breakthroughs I've made with songs have been by accident. And even just from research and stuff, there's a song on my album called "CSIRAC", and it's about the first computer that made electronic music, and it was an Australian computer. And I was reading about it, and it wasn't made to make music. It did it by accident. So all of these cool advancements in technology seem like they've come by accident. And it's It's just a little bit heartbreaking when it seems like people want to skip that step and just have the final product. I mean, I get it if you're just a music enjoyer or consumer, and the concept of just being able to snap your fingers and have your favorite song in front of you is cool. But I think people like music for more than how it sounds as well. People like an artist because they have something to say or they're interested in their perspective and stuff. I don't think an AI can really have a perspective because it doesn't have any context for the world and life and stuff. For me, at least, that's the saddest thing about it is. It just seems like people want to skip over the step of discovery.

Just the reference points as well, because when I was digging into the record, I didn't know about the CSIRAC computer at all. I mean, even pulling that onto the album, I mean, is beyond the technological history there. Is there an Australian point of pride there? And also referencing that—

On the album?

Yeah.

Yes. Absolutely. Yes. I feel like I wanted this album to be Australian dance music.

Really?

Yeah. Even the "iPod Touch" video was shot in my hometown, which is a couple of hours away from Sydney. Because I guess so much of why... How do I say? I think I don't know if I would be the producer that I am, or whatever, if I had grown up in a city or something where I was really stimulated. So much of my imagination or whatever was developed, I think, from the absence of stimuli, from having growing up in a small town and using the Internet.

You had to keep yourself busy.

Yeah, exactly. So that was just looking back on my life and being like, "Oh, that's made me who I am now." And that was a big point of inspiration. So I wanted to have that in the visuals. And there's a few references to the bus, and that my bus was Bus 64. And yeah, so I definitely wanted it. And even sonically, the first song I made for the album was "All I Am". It's not the oldest song, but it's the first song where I felt like this is for the album. And up until that point, I was listening to so much like Pineau ,and Empire of the Sun, and The Presets. And I was trying to absorb the Australian dance music canon and stuff. So yeah, I wanted it to be a little bit Australiana, but not in an on the nose way, just like a... Because I'm Australian, I guess. I can't ignore that piece of my life if the album is going to be about my life.

When you started to branch out creatively and put yourself out there onto the music scene, I imagine more IRL than online, where did you find yourself? Because at least from an outside perspective, in terms of a lot of what we talk about over here, and as you know, a lot of Australian music makes it over here these days. It's like the psych and garage rock scene. It's Tame Impala. As far It's like a lot of electronic music goes. It's Flume. What is the EDM scene down there right now currently? And is that something that you found yourself ingrained in if it was there for you to flourish within? Or did you find a lot of your creativity flourishing and getting a reception online more than in person or locally around you?

Yeah, I think it's been hard to say. And also because I wasn't really observant of that stuff, because when I was first putting out music and making music and even first getting any attention for it at all. I wasn't really trying to have success or make it splash. It was my hobby, and I was just doing it because it was fun and it felt good and stuff. And then if people liked the songs and I got show offers, I would do them. But I really had no idea what I was doing. I was just like, well, I like this and it's working, so I'm going to keep doing it. I didn't know anything about being an artist or what. I don't have any friends or family in the music. I just didn't know anything, and I didn't care about that stuff. I think all of... I mean, aside from Flume, who's been a hero of mine since I was 12 or something. He's been so huge in Australia for so long, especially for... I've been to so many of his shows. He's awesome. A lot of my musical heroes have come from overseas, and the music that I am super inspired by wasn't really big in Australia. It's still not super big in Australia. It's maybe a bit more... I don't know. I guess I probably felt like I was part of more online communities than Australian music communities until maybe recently, I guess. But it's hard to know. I don't know if I step outside of myself and look at this stuff enough to really have an informed opinion about it. I just make music and hang out with my friends and go wherever I get invitations, I guess.

Well, now you're starting to also get some ARIA nods and nominations, correct? What's What does that feel like? And you've gotten so many. You've got to win one of them, right? Are we anticipating some Ws coming?

I hope so. It would be great.

I feel like you increased your chances. It's more than just one.

I don't know. I had no idea making this music. You know what I mean? It's like I said, I feel like my music has just existed in more online spaces for so long, and I have never felt the artist that would be nominated for those things, because I don't know, it just doesn't really happen for the music I make. But it's really cool. I'm so grateful. I mean, I hope, one would be amazing. Two would be cool. I mean, you know what I mean? I'm just super grateful for the nomination. But I release on an indie label, NLV Records, and we've done it together since I was a teenager, and I have not many of us working on this stuff. So it's just cool. That was just so random to happen to all of us together, and I'm grateful it was with the team I've always been with.

I don't want to get you in trouble, but I wanted to ask, just given all the technological nods across the record, have you ever hacked anything? Have you ever had to hack into a mainframe?

No, I never have.

Open up a program, pull something apart like that.

No, I really haven't. I was actually... When I was about eight or something, I went I really wanted a pet bird, and I never had one. But I went through this phase of really wanting a pet bird. So I was just googling stuff about how to take care of them to be like, "Mom, look, I know what I'm doing. Can we please get a bird?" And I got a virus on the family computer from bird research. And it really scared me off any shit like that ever again. I was not even really torrenting or pirating. So I'm not a hacker.

That's the most innocent thing you've caught a virus doing.

I know. Well, that's why it scared me off. I was like, if I'm going to fuck up the family computer from bird research, I better not be going any deeper than that. You know what I mean? So, yeah, it really scared me off. I've never been a hacker. It's just not in me.

Given your view of the computer as a tool for exploring music and experiencing music, what are some of your earliest music memories that you can recall, computer-related or not?

That's such a cool question. The song "Love at First Sight" by Kylie Minogue.

Okay.

I remember—

Australian queen.

Yes. My mom is a huge Kylie fan, so I grew up listening to Kylie all the time. I remember it really vividly because I was super young. And my mom told me that when she saw me, it was love at first sight. So that has always stayed with me. I have a lot of memories of listening to the radio in the car with my dad. He's a big radio listener. And I'm trying to go way back. The song "Forever" by the Veronicas. That was huge for me. That was probably one of my earliest favorite songs. I think "Don't Ya" by the Pussy Cat Dolls. I was obsessed with, and my mom had— It was so big when it came out.

It was huge.

I was so obsessed with it. I was five years old. I think it was my first day of kindergarten. And my mom had it the single on a CD, and I brought it in for show and tell. I was like, this is my favorite song. I don't know if I have any computer-related music memories. The first time I made music was on GarageBand on my mom's iMac when I was eight or so. I was just messing around. I would record my... I played the clarinet in the primary school band, and I would record it through the mic, and the metronome was playing in the background because I didn't know how to change the tempo.

So you just stuck on the preset tempo on GarageBand?

Yeah, no idea about anything. It was just fun. But that's probably my first computer-related music memory.

Are you still carrying any clarinet chops with you?

No, I'm not. Unfortunately, I haven't played the clarinet for-

Has it been, or could it be at some point, a sample on something?

Oh, absolutely. I would love to. Yeah, audio is so awesome, like audio in the sense of... Yeah, like any kind of scrap recorded sound. Yeah, I don't have a clarinet on me, but yeah, I would love to record.

I wasn't going to force you to perform right now. Don't worry about it. I I wasn't here to check in on your clarinet abilities, I promise.

It's been a minute.

I also wanted to ask you about some of the imagery that you've worked on the album cover over here, and also pops up in some of your music videos. One of the most prominent of which that I find to be very curious is just the 5G tower pictures. There are some contexts in which that is a very dark, scary, ominous thing. Like In pulling on that thread, are you looking to trigger some people, get some conspiracy nuts in your comments for the TikTok engagement? It's like, does the 5G tower, does the shadow it cast onto your life? Is it a dark one, or is it just like that's a fun, cool thing?

No, it's more of a fun, cool thing. I don't feel like I'm a very controversial person.

You weren't wearing a tinfoil hat around the 5G tower in the music video. It was almost like a loving experience.

Yeah, no, totally. Well, I think probably about mid-2024, which was when I was still releasing girl EDM and stuff, but I was starting I think about the album. I made a couple of songs for it, and I was just starting to see them everywhere and think that they looked so uncanny and funny. It's like if you'd never seen one and you were driving along and you just saw one popped out of the ground, you'd be like, what the hell is that? But because they're everywhere, no one really looks at them or think about them. But I just started to notice them all the time and the different colourways and silhouettes and of the cell towers. And then, once I realized my album was about my computer, I started to think about ways that I could the sonify it. And I made up this headcanon about how maybe to a computer, that's the access point to the Internet. And maybe to a computer, that could be something akin to a church, a place of worship. They're everywhere, all over the world. And I just started to try to think about them and how would they fit into a fantasy novel or what else could they be, I guess. And a lot of it's just fun and silly. There's no… I'm definitely not trying to conspiracy-bait or anything like that. I also just think they look cool. A lot of grotesque man-made… Everything was made by someone, you know what I mean? I know that they're purely made for functionality or whatever, but they also just look sick. They look like the thing that someone would draw up for a sci-fi novel or something. I just imagine if you'd never seen one before and then you saw that, you'd be like, What the hell am I looking at? But they're everywhere. And I just thought they looked cool, honestly.

All right. Not to call you out, but I have to imagine your room doesn't actually look like this.

Definitely not.

So what here is real? What here is staged? And is this a reflection at all of, I don't know, maybe a love of hoarding? Is there something about the complication and just the clutter of this that you feel like is representative of something that you've personally experienced?

I think when you said before, when you're talking about those images where you can't really identify anything, that was a major reference for this picture. But I honestly just wanted to fit as much of my life as I could into the image. My room definitely doesn't look like that. I don't live like that. If you moved the frame, that was definitely a set. There's a few things that are edited in. For example, that shirt doesn't actually say IOMC. It says RABID.

Oh, okay.

Yeah. Those things. There's a few little… I think the CRT, it says CSIRAC on it. It didn't actually… It said Teek or something. There's a few things like that that are edited, but we set it up like that. If you moved the camera a meter to the left, it would be a tidy room.

It's totally normal.

No, fully. But it was cool because it was in my It was an actual room, so we could afford to leave it set up like that for multiple days and just rearrange it and shoot it again.

Because there's some older keyboards and tech and screens in there that you'd have to go to the thrift shop or something to get your hands on. Is this stuff that has always been around in some capacity, or did you need to go out and find it and then bring it back and use it or tinger with it or incorporate it into your life after you had found it somewhere else?

Yeah, well, most of the stuff was already in I'd say probably at least half of it was already in my house. My actual laptop is in there, my clothes or whatever. A lot of it was borrowed from friends. Probably about half of it was just what do people have around and stuff like that. So it was all just sourced from wherever, but it wasn't an expensive shoot. We just used what we had around and borrowed stuff and got it together. But yeah, But it was just we were fortunate that I could do it in my house and mess it up that way, because it took so long to set up. And if we did it in a studio, you'd spend the whole day setting up, be like, "Quick, got to got to pack it down." But we got to play around with it, which was really cool.

Keeping that in mind, where do you feel like your personal connection with storytelling and sharing with the audience is going to continue? You've given them a big slice of your life during this certain moment in your youth and your adolescence. What sections of your life or your existence you see yourself telling stories about going forward from here into the future as you write more songs?

It's hard to know because... Well, I mean, nothing on this album felt hard to share. None of it's really embarrassing or maybe "Delete" is a little bit vulnerable, but otherwise it all felt pretty easy. I think I probably just have to to go and live more life and put more fruits in the juice machine to have something to transcribe and stuff like that. But I really am excited to make another album. I've seen people, especially dance music artists and stuff, talk about how making an album was really hard or exhausting or it's not worth it and it's easier to do singles these days or whatever. But locking in and making an album has totally changed my life. And it's been this awesome medium for expression that I couldn't tell that story with one song or two songs. It's all of them put together. So I'm so excited to make another album. I don't know what it's going to say or sound like. There's a few songs that didn't make it onto this one that I hope have a life somewhere. But yeah, it's still... I released it and then went on tour straight away. So once I get home, I'll probably be able to stew on it a little bit more and know what is going to happen next. But I don't know. I'm just excited to make another album, honestly.

Yeah. I mean, what you just describe there in terms of what other EDM artists are doing or thinking in terms of their output, that does seem to be the norm. Do you attribute that to, I don't know, what the audience demands are of electronic music, as opposed to audiences for other genres, or maybe just the economy around the genre, where artists aren't being made or broken by whether or not they drop a full-length album, and it's more about how many live sets you can play, and so on and so forth, in order to make a living. Is there something about making an album in your experience as an electronic music artist that isn't as economical? It's just like focusing on singles and performing?

Yeah, I think it's probably a genre thing, and it's a little bit different because you don't really see rock artists being like, well, maybe you do. Maybe I'm out of touch, maybe. But I feel like you don't, as much as dance music, see artists from other worlds being like, it's all about singles. Everyone's totally doing albums. I feel like there's not really any artists who have had a long-standing impact that haven't released albums.

I think a lot of rock music does still culturally revolve around the album cycle. And I think that's part of the reason that the genre has shifted in the way that it has in terms of its significance, because we don't exist, I think, in an album paradigm in terms of what drives popular music, per se. Artists still drop albums, obviously. I think it has changed back a little bit. I think since the mid-2010s where it seems like the playlist was the new shiny exciting thing, and I think it still continues to be in a big way. That has changed a little bit as people, I think, are getting less and less exciting experiences through just only listening to playlists. I think that is creating a bit more excitement around albums once again. It is a bit of a pendulum swing in the other direction. Not like one that's so radical that people are just throwing their playlist in the trash. Playlists are probably still not going anywhere, broadly speaking. But I think people are looking for maybe more focus and more curation, and albums provide that when an artist actually thinks about the sequence of the record and they actually care about how the album moves.

I know you've talked about this before, and I still want to pick your range a little bit longer. What thought did you put in to the sequencing behind this record? Because it does seem like you put a lot of work into the way the songs progress. Aside from what slices of life we're getting from the feelings that you describe or the experiences that you describe on specific tracks, what do you feel like the album, in a macro picture says about you personally or the character portrait you're trying to paint?

Yeah. I think, well, I just wanted to say as well on the last point about EDM or whatever as well with albums and singles. It feels like maybe a functionality thing as well with where a lot of dance music is made for the club and for the dance floor, and it's not meant to tell a story. It's just meant to make people move, which is so awesome. That's such a cool thing that music can do. But I get it for those artists. It doesn't make sense to make an album because they're not necessarily trying to tell a story. They just want the one song that's on everyone's USBs and everyone's playing it. And that's the dance track of the year. So I just wanted to say that in case anyone thought I was shading EDM and their release process or whatever.

No, absolutely not.

It's just a different expression, I think. But I've put so much thought into the sequencing of this thing. In every interview or whatever I've done, I've said, "Please listen to it from the front to the back, because the order changed so much, and I wanted it to feel a bit like a DJ set, not entirely. I love the way Skrillex did it this year with his album. It was so cool, but I didn't want it to be that extreme. Even though I love that, I still wanted it to feel like every song could be played from the start to finish and feel like its own song on its own. But, basically, when I had the songs all 90% done, I would lay them out like the MP3s in Ableton, and then just play and see how the transition sounds between each moment. Then, some of them I would be like, "Oh, that sounds whack." I would go and retcon it with, for example, between "CSIRAC" and "Delete", there's a transition that both songs were done, and then I felt like they sounded weird. The two songs are super different, and it sounded weird going from one into the next. So I just went back into the... And that's what's awesome about being a producer is I just hit "export," and the song's done from my computer. I don't need to go and ask someone to change it. I don't need to try and give instructions. I can just do it. That's what I love about computer music. But I just go back and actually make the transition, re-export it, put it back. "Oh, okay, it sounds good now." And just do that for the whole... Like, play sing, sing good was so annoying because it was the only song that doesn't have drums.

It's a low-key moment.

Yeah. There was so many points where I was like, "Oh, it just feels weird there." And then it's hype again, and then it was such a problem. But then I changed the end of "Battery Death", so it had a soft fade out. And then the start of "It's You" has Darcy's guitar, and that was it. "It fits, finally." But yeah, there was a few changes to the track once for sure, just to accommodate that, because that's how I wanted it to feel.

What were, when you were crafting this album, I mean, you talked about some certain songs or singles that were big for you as a kid. Were there certain albums that when you were putting this together were a reference point for you, in terms of this is what a good sequenced, a well sequenced album, feels like? In terms of some albums that you enjoyed listening to from front to back when you were younger?

That's a really good question because I did listen to heaps of albums. And also just albums that I grew up with where I felt like I enjoyed every song, and there were no low moments. Because, for me, I know everyone's taste is different, but, for me, I love every song on my albums. I wanted it to feel like... I know not everyone loves every song, but I made it for me. You know what I mean? So I wanted it to feel like I like every song stuff. So one of my favorite bands ever is Alt J. And their first two albums I listened to... I mean, they're whole discography is great, but especially their first two albums. When I was in school, I listened to so much and I love every... An Awesome Wave, their first album, it's seared into my brain. I've listened to that album so many times. So that was like a... I know it doesn't sound anything like my album, but it was a bit of a reference for crafting an album, I guess. Trying to think of some others. Two Star & the Dream Police that came out, it just came out around when I was working on this, and I was listening to it so much, and it feels like an album. I'm trying to think. Currents by Tame Impala. Yeah, a lot of it is not dance music that I was trying to think what else.

I mean, it's not dance music, but it's showing you an example of what's good album curation. It's all the songs It feels like on all those records reinforce each other. Either they have an interesting progression to them, or they all reinforce each other really well. It feels like you're almost, and I would say this is the same for your album, you feel immersed in a certain world that the artist has built for you.

It's, at least in the case of some of them, it's producer music as well, even if it's not electronic dance or everything blends and stuff. But I wanted to make a good one and listen to a lot of good ones and see if I could get anything from them.

I think you have, and I appreciate you taking the time.

Yeah. No, thank you so much. Yeah. Thanks for supporting my album. I appreciate it.

Thanks for making an album worth supporting.

Thank you.