Chasing Fridays: Ninajirachi, Knocked Loose, flyingfish Q&A, more

I don't have much new to report this week. Still posting on Nina, still working on some freelance projects, still chipping away at my long-in-the-making shoegaze book (it'll be worth the wait, don't worry). My last few Chasing Fridays issues have been particularly long, so I tried (and failed) to keep this one relatively compact. I wrote about a new song from Knocked Loose that thoroughly defied my expectations, as well as a new record from Katzin. Then, I reflected on my time at a Ninajirachi show last weekend and tried to articulate where her music sits relative to much of the other trendy electro-pop I've been covering in Chasing Sundays. Lastly, I interviewed shoegaze wunderkind flyingfish about no longer making shoegaze.

Knocked Loose - "Hive Mind" (Feat. Denzel Curry)

Knocked Loose and Denzel Curry are both artists who I respect, who I've enjoyed seeing live, who I'm happy to see succeed, but who I don't often feel compelled to listen to on my own time. The first Knocked Loose EP, 2014's Pop Culture, was big for me when it dropped because it synced up perfectly with my personal transition from metalcore to hardcore fan. Knocked Loose were still just a regionally notable hardcore band at the time, but the song "All My Friends" was prescient of where they'd end up. Metallic hardcore songs that are simultaneously that catchy, that anguished, and that bludgeoning don't just fall out of any old local band's guitar pickups. "All My Friends" was a goddamn song in the way professional bands who've been writing for years write songs.

Knocked Loose have written many more songs since then. Songs that are heavier, scarier, weirder, and more technically sophisticated. Songs that have made them one of the biggest heavy bands – not just hardcore bands, but heavy bands – in the entire world. But for me personally, "Hive Mind" is the best song they've written since "All My Friends." This song is absolutely nasty. It's cruel. They didn't need to write this song. They're already touring with Metallica this summer. They're already playing to bigger crowds than any hardcore band not named Turnstile ever have. It's gratuitous, like spiking the football in the end zone when your team is already up by 40 points.

But that's exactly what makes "Hive Mind" so great. It's a victory lap. A flex. A showcase of a band who are operating at the peak of their game. The fact that Knocked Loose have spent the last decade improving their craft, only getting heavier and darker and denser the more popular they get, has enabled them to write a song like "Hive Mind." A song with a hook that entire arenas will chant like the "a-hoo!" scene in 300. With a devilish one-liner – "I DON'T CARE THAT YOU HATE YOURSELF" – that will surely be inked into multiple fan's bodies by the year's end. With multiple breakdowns that are more ignorant than what any Metallica opener has ever written. ​Screamed choruses and decimating mosh parts are tropes that Knocked Loose have already mastered. They sound particularly impactful on "Hive Mind," but they're nothing new from this band.

What really takes "Hive Mind" to another level is that Knocked Loose managed to refine their familiar pleasures while also trying some new things. Isaac Hale plays a guitar solo on here that fucking shreds in a way his playing never has. Knocked Loose have never been a guitar solos band, and in fact, one of my main critiques of their music is that the riffs are too blocky and repetitive, and could actually benefit from some flashy style. The solos on here are iced the fuck out. They add a fresh dimension to Knocked Loose's sound without impeding on the song's brute force. The chorus – "HIVE! MIND!" – is also sticky in a way Knocked Loose's refrains rarely are. My favorite thing about Knocked Loose is that they've become a world-conquering metalcore band without a single clean chorus in their repertoire. "Hive Mind" continues that streak while also delivering their most infectious vocal since "arf arf!"

Then there's Denzel Curry. The Florida rapper is a real-deal hardcore fan who's made music with a metal-tinged heaviness before, so his presence here isn't particularly shocking. However, even though I knew Curry had the right energy for a track like this, I didn't know the band were capable of accommodating his presence so fluidly. Knocked Loose could've used Curry as an accoutrement to "Hive Mind," letting him rap a short verse, pop out in the music video, and maybe join in on the hook. Instead, they have him spit a full 16 over an instrumental that mutates from a bouncing chug to a two-stepping jog, and Curry sounds 100 percent natural rapping the whole way through. Later in the song, they tease a breakdown by giving Curry a bass-boosted trap beat to rile the crowd with, and it doesn't feel like a clunky mish-mash of styles. It just sounds cool. It sounds fresh. It makes me want to "motherfucking jump, bitch."

I almost always lose interest in hardcore bands once they graduate from the actual hardcore underground and begin touring with metal acts and working with bigwig rock producers. When hardcore bands start headlining shows with barricades and bringing out kids who push-mosh during spin-kick parts, it's no longer hardcore to me. It's something else. That's not to say the music automatically becomes bad, although in many cases there is a decline in quality. It's just no longer serving the function that I want it to, and no longer occupying a sub-cultural space that's relatable to me. Knocked Loose haven't lived in my preferred domain of hardcore for nearly a decade now, so what's most striking about "Hive Mind" is that I actually like it. It's actually hard. It's actually thrilling. It actually makes me to want to see Knocked Loose live again.

Katzin - Buckaroo

Don't let the title of Katzin's debut album, Buckaroo, convince you this is some more alt-country chum to throw atop the grain pile. The project of NYC musician Zion Battle (impossibly cool name) is rife with iconography from the American West (songs titled "All Hat, No Cattle" and "Cowboy") and both slide guitar and banjo are included in the packed stable of instruments that Katzin reaches for. However, the majority of Buckaroo sounds more like what Pitchfork would've called "freak-folk" in the mid-2000s. For every part that's reminiscent of Youth Lagoon's pastoral dream-pop, there's a hot-blooded guitar solo, a detour into glitchy electronica, or a plunky, heartful chorus (I'm thinking of "Cowboy" specifically) that sounds like early Arcade Fire for the Alex G generation. Take it from someone whose tolerance for woodsy indie-rock is at an all-time low: Buckaroo is a rousing exception.

Ninajirachi, Cannelle, 2charm live in Cleveland

There are two tours crisscrossing North America this winter that feel like defining moments for the post-hyperpop epoch. One is Snow Strippers' ongoing U.S. headliner, the insane footage of which provides tangible proof that the "indie sleaze" poster children aren't just astroturfed by coastal clout fiends, but are actually at the forefront of a real cultural movement. Concurrent to Snow Strippers leaving a trail of sweat-soaked trapper hats in every city they blow through, Ninajirachi has been riding out the growing hype for her 2025 debut, I Love My Computer, which was one of my favorite albums of last year. She just wrapped her latest leg of North American dates at a sold-out show in Cleveland that my squad and I were lucky to catch, and it felt like witnessing an important nexus in her career: not yet a household name, but no longer an underground secret.

The Australian producer/singer is an ascendant star in the increasingly bustling realm of EDM that hovers well below the mainstream festival tier (where the Illenium's and Marshmello's reside) but above the strata of musicians whose online buzz far outweighs their IRL crowds (where the Umru's and Cowgirl Clue's inhabit). Both musically and culturally, hyperpop feels like the best word to describe the space where Ninajirachi is prevailing; the world of PC Music, Porter Robinson, 100 gecs, and pre-Brat Charli XCX. A scene where slick pop maximalism is accepted – even encouraged – so long as it's presented with a quirky outsider-ness that grants the music a loveable, often relatable, form of underdog earnestness.

Although there's some crossover between that world of music and the world of Snow Strippers (see: Frost Children's remix of Ninajirachi's "Fuck My Computer"), seeing Ninajrachi live and dancing with her fanbase confirmed to me that these are two separate scenes with two distinct sensibilities. The iteration of electropop where Snow Strippers live alongside Fcukers, Bassvictim, and, whether they want to be there or not, The Hellp, is cool-kid shit. Music that may have originated as a tongue-in-cheek appropriation of mean girl scowls and douchebag grins, but has now become music for out-and-out mean girls and douchebags who wear all the "indie sleaze" tropes like fast fashion accessories; hedonistic, aloof, (mostly) hetero, and happy to objectify women to aid their own pantomime of risqué chicness circa 2006.

Snow Strippers make music for girls who are "Just Your Doll": submissive, waifish, who won't complain because they actually "Kinda Like It That Way." Ninajirachi makes self-described "girl music." She's very intentionally cultivating a space where femininity is celebrated not for its sexualized marketing potential, but for the artistic merits of non-male producers such as herself. She named her 2024 mixtape girl EDM – which is loaded with femme collaborators – as a way of cheekily co-opting how her music would be reductively categorized by bro-steppers; essentially the "female-fronted" equivalent for electronic producers.

Today, the title reads like a manifestation of Ninajirachi's swift insurgency into an exhaustingly male-dominated field. Her music isn't loaded with the heavy-handed girlboss feminism of yore, and that implicit rather than lecturing tone ("girl music" is, after all, quite vague) probably makes her message that much more persuasive: "I'm here, I'm doing this. You could be, too."

At one point during Ninajirachi's set in Cleveland, the words "girl music" idled on the screen behind her while she fidgeted with the decks and whipped her hair to and froe. This was over an hour into her all-gas performance, and the audience had entered that post-runners high trance state from jumping so much that everyone's self-conscious exteriors had melted away. I heard a young twenty-something guy behind me yell, "shoutout girl music!" with pure, un-mocking sincerity. That brief remark was a good representation of everyone in the crowd who I rubbed shoulders with. The demographic was diverse, but age-wise it was mostly twenty-somethings, older teens, and a few scattered 30-and-ups. It was a pretty clean split between femmes and dudes, and the outfits ranged from oversized leg warmers and black mini-skirts to skin-tight Invader Zim t-shirts and Glep from Smiling Friends beanies.

Most of the guys scanned as casual Fantano viewers, while most of the girls looked like they probably dated Fantano viewers. I didn't see any influencer types or bottle service fiends. No one was visibly intoxicated or treating the show as an an excuse to party. Everyone was there for the music, and for Ninajirachi specifically – including the first of two openers. 2charm are an Australian pop duo who allegedly met in a Gooner Discord server and are now applying their love of edging to a musical context. All of their songs are produced and co-written by Ninajirachi, but 2charm's candied electropop hooks were less memorable than their synchronized dance routine that included stripping down to their shorts, busting out push-ups, and cycling through several suggestive gestures where they appeared to be on the verge of making out, creating a tension that entertained the audience to no end. My self-proclaimed "fujo girlfriend" was hollering with her gay bff, and I was thoroughly amused by how well their campy schtick was going over.

Cannelle, a French singer-producer who just dropped a sick song with Rada, was unfortunately a far less engaging opener, and I could tell that the audience – who braved 8 degree weather to get to the show – was getting restless for the headliner. The anticipation was brought to a boil while Ninajirachi's sound tech spent upwards of 10 minutes trying to diagnose an issue with the decks, and by the time the stage-hand finally flashed the signal to dim the lights, a roaring "Nina! Nina! Nina!" chant suffocated the brooding drone note that gurgled from the monitors. After several more minutes that felt like months, a series of computer code began running down the screen and a garbled cyborg voice spoke "i love my computer" in between one-second snippets of her most recognizable songs, exacerbating the growing hype.

Eventually, the drone note screeched to a halt and the robot voice chirped, "I've never been to Cleveland," a riff on her album's first line, "I've never been to London." And it was indeed the truth. "Hello Cleve-e-lend," a giddy Ninajirachi shouted once she took her place behind the decks, adding a third syllable to the city's name to give it a sort of European suaveness. She was wearing a tight black longsleeve, black shorts-shorts, and white fingerless gloves, a stylish yet functional outfit that allowed her to move relentlessly from behind the table, leaping and thrashing and swaying while doing what appeared to be actual live mixing the whole night. The two front legs of the table were entwined with bright blue gamer lights that looked like fiber optic cables strangling the furniture like wild vines. Behind her, the screen displayed a quickfire montage of web pages and internet iconography that spewed open like pop-up ads on a sketchy website.

The show felt like witnessing an elaborate Valentine's Day exchange between Ninajirachi and her computer: her lover, her confidante, her best friend, and now her business associate, given the fruits of their collaborative labor – Nina impressively makes all of her colossal songs right in her bedroom – have yielded them sold-out shows 9,500 miles away from home in New South Whales. All of the imagery on the screen celebrated her internet kid upbringing-cum-career, and at one point it struck me that even when everyone around me was swept up in a flurry of tangible, totally unplugged euphoria, we were still singing and bouncing and raging to songs about iPods, thirst traps, dark web snuff images, and Nina's unbridled desire to fuck her computer. It sounds a lot less cool when I spell it out like that: a bunch of mostly sober music geeks politely bopping around to songs named after vintage Australian computers. But the show was exhilarating. Wholesome, yes, but also thrilling.

To many, the dweeby friendliness of hyperpop – the genre of personal computer music, of custom ringtones, of shouting out niche Charli songs produced by Sophie – is what Snow Strippers and their ilk are reacting against. All of their reference points – musical, visual, textual – are an attempt at jerry-rigging a return to the casual debauchery and icy exclusivity of the time before social media ran our lives, before the internet became the central domain for music culture. I see the appeal of that music, but Ninajirachi, I think cleverly and effectively, embraces her generation's internet addiction and uses that relatability to get her fans out of the house and onto the dancefloor. Her songs are undeniable and the community forming around her music is potent. I felt it. It's real. It's joyous. It's accepting. It's girl music (but boys are allowed). And that's the truth.

Chasing Down

Sam Fishman
of
flyingfish

Chasing Down is a Q&A series with artists, friends, and others of good taste.

Anyone who's followed shoegaze in the 2020s is familiar with flyingfish. The project of 17-year-old multi-instrumentalist Sam Fishman was a beneficiary of shoegaze's Tiktok blow-up back in 2023, when a few of his Dustery shoegaze instrumentals took off online at the same time that Wisp, Quannnic, and Novulent were experiencing the same viral rush. Although flyingfish's 2023 haul (particularly the song "Wonder If You Care") continues to boast an ungodly amount of Spotify streams for a lo-fi shoegaze act, Fishman is no longer interested in making that kind of music. Last year, he dropped a ragged ripper of a song called "Pitching Stones" that I compared to Cloud Nothings and Weatherday. It was fully unrecognizable from the artist who made "Wonder If You Care," and it provided an intriguing glimpse at a potential new phase in flyingfish's career.

This year, flyingfish is properly commencing his Second Attempt. That's the title of Fishman's new EP, and it's a fitting name for a collection of songs that serve as a musical reinvention for flyingfish. There's still a little bit of shoegaze in there ("Spotless Mind"), but the project also explores knotty emo ("Probably, Honestly"), smoldering screamo ("Burn"), and a more chipper variant of tattered emo that once again brings to mind Weatherday's poppier side ("Parachute Day"). I think it's a successful pivot for flyingfish, and I'm curious to see how his fanbase takes to it. For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked Fishman about changing up his sound, internalizing negative feedback, the bands who inspire his new direction, where his generation of Tiktok shoegazers are headed next, and more. Read the full interview below.