August 2025 AOTM

Those who know me know that I am, at my core, an emo bitch. This month saw the release of the first Ethel Cain album I’ve liked, the debut album of Racing Mount Pleasant (a band I’ve already gushed extensively about), and most importantly a new album by Deftones. Private Music, the new Deftones album, is everything I could have asked for and so much more. The mixing is spotless, the instrumentation is heavy, gritty, dynamic, and balances all this with melodic swells that feel like fire under your skin. It is an easy ten out of ten and instantly became one of my favorite Deftones albums. Rock is the genre I know best, it’s everything I love most about music. 


Do you know how insane an EDM album needs to be for me to rank it above Deftones?

 


Ninajirachi - I Love My Computer 

Tracks 12

Runtime 40mins

Favorite Tracks iPod Touch, F**k My Computer, CSIRAC, Delete, Infohazard, Sing Good

 

I Love My Computer, one of my most anticipated albums of the year, is about growing up in the birth of the internet age, and the complicated relationship we form with the devices that come with us everywhere. I was born in 2001, only two years later than Nina, and kids in that time never had a pre-internet life. This eldritch source of infinite knowledge and power has been our constant companion since birth and we, being children, used it for the two most important things in the world: music and talking to our friends. It was all a little bit lawless back then. The massive corporations that have taken over everything hadn’t quite figured out how to monetize everything, no one really knew how UI design worked so every website looked blocky and clunky, and it felt so easy and so magical to run into corners of the web that only one or two people had ever been before.

The internet gave us all access to art whenever we wanted, art you couldn’t find anywhere else, but there’s a bit of loneliness in that. It’s strange and surreal finding some magical piece of music no one you know has heard of and having no one to talk to about it, not even knowing how to describe the feeling it gives you. But it’s yours. It’s your secret song, in your earbuds, just for you.

iPod Touch focuses that nostalgia into a full on light show. It somehow lets you re-live the feeling of finding that song that changes your life all over again. The lyrics flash images of that hyper specific childhood,
“It sounds like high school, front gate, smoke in my face
It sounds like dyed, frayed, high-waist, bought at Supré
It sounds like loving you is easy but they boosted the bass”.
And it really does sound like that. Nina’s 2012 Monstercat-era EDM style has always brought back that giddy spine tingling sensation I used to get when I first got into the genre. It feels like seeing an old friend again. The pumping side chained bass, echoing vocals with wide harmonies, it finds a way to flood every single dopamine receptor I have.

I think the unashamed adoration and appreciation for the genre that Nina shows is one of the most moving things about this album. I’ve heard so many people, including myself, say things like “haha yeah I went through an EDM phase in middle school”. Something about this style is seen as unsophisticated, immature, and a little bit cringe, but Nina rejects that notion. She doesn’t even entertain it. There’s not a single point on the album where her choice of this style of EDM feels ironic or insincere. Every beat every word every chord is unashamed, reverent even. It’s…romantic.

Even the songs about the darker pieces of their relationship only serve to reinforce that romance. The internet is a crazy place and to interact with it is to put a piece of yourself on display for the whole world, even when you only want one person to be looking. Delete takes us back to that feeling of trying to catch one person’s attention. Taking a picture in something exposing, picking a song they like just in case they see it, sitting in bed just you and your computer, stomach full of butterflies, giggling about how they’ll react when they see what you posted.

Of course the poison in the internet gets darker than that. Wading through it as children, stumbling website to website like a newborn deer, it’s inevitable you find something that burns into your head and haunts your dreams. Cartel executions by chainsaw, videos of steel workers ripped apart by machinery, it’s rare I meet someone who doesn’t have one. This is the subject of the song Infohazard. It’s a strange topic for the middle of an album about love but a necessary one. Lovers will hurt you without meaning to. Sometimes in ways you never forget. This song repeats the phrase “in my dreams, on my screen”, bringing the world of the computer out of the data stream and into the human brain, a place that is just as fake, and just as real. That connection draws an interesting parallel between seeing unexpected gore on the computer and intrusive thoughts, your brain throwing the worst possible ideas into the foreground of your mind.

The most important part of the album though, is that it fuckin rips. Like it really is just 40 minutes of straight bangers. The whole thing bristles with blood pumping energy that, whether through headphones or club speakers, feels like getting hooked up to a car battery in the best way. Love can do a lot; it can hurt you, it can help you create amazing things, but most importantly of all, it feels good. Thats why we let it drive us crazy.

I Love my Computer is one of the most beautiful, most moving collections of love songs I have ever heard, full stop. The way that Ninajirachi expresses love for the internet, her computer, and the music they make together, is so whole, so sincere. Even when it shows her things she maybe shouldn’t see, even when it leads you to do silly things for people you have a crush on, Nina loves her computer. It’s love you can feel through the speakers, in every fiber of your being. 


 

Other Albums from this month I enjoyed (there's a lot this month!)

Ethel Cain - Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You

  • The first Ethel Cain Album I have truly loved. Significantly more restrained than Preacher's Daughter in theme and I think I think taking a step down in terms of spectacle really lets her songwriting skill show through. The ambient pieces of this album are also so beautiful.

Deftones - Private Music

  • Everything I love about Deftones all wrapped up in one album. High chance this ends up on my end of year roundup.

Wisp - If Not Winter

  • I'm really enjoying the new wave of shoegaze characterized by that high echoey female vocalist style and super washed out guitar heavy composition, and this is one of the best I've heard all year.

Racing Mount Pleasant - Racing Mount Pleasant

  • Their debut album under this new name (their last album was originally released under the name Kingfisher) is, to put it lightly, brilliant. If you loved Ants From Up There by Black Country, New Road and wish their new album sounded a bit more like that, you will love this album. One of the most moving albums I've heard all year.

Ayesha Erotica - precum

  • Cunty, trashy, slutty, skanky, it sounds like what doing poppers feels like.

Joey Valence and Brae - HYPERYOUTH

  • Their Beastie Boys style is so fun and so addictive, but I still wasn't crazy about their last album. But throw in a lot more hyperpop stylings, features from JPEGMAFIA and Rebecca Black, and the bar "went for some chinese food and the fortune cookie told me i was GOATed" followed by a gong sound effect so loud it damn near blows your eardrums out and entirely drowns out the next line, and I am SOLD.

TOPS - Bury The Key

  • More of their classic 80's indie pop sound. Magdalena Bay fans will love this.

The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die - Dreams of Being Dust

  • "Post-hardcore midwest emo" is one of many things you can say to get me to instantly perk up like a dog hearing the word "walk". This will me huge for the emos that tend towards the heavy stuff.  



Albums from previous months I missed

Saint Levant - Love Letters / رسائل حب

  • I might have to get into Arabic pop music more because this is one of the most fun pop albums I've heard all year. It's short but every single song is a banger. If you check out anything I've mentioned this year make it this album because not only does it bang, Saint Levant donates almost everything he makes from his music directly to aiding the people of Palestine.