While a collaboration between Porter Robinson and Ninajirachi felt inevitable, it’s also very possible it might never have happened.
Talking to Billboard over Zoom — Robinson is at home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Ninajirachi is in Chicago for Lollapalooza, where she played yesterday — both admit that they’re typically too shy to reach out to other artists to see if they want to work together.
But understanding the significant connective tissue between his work and Nina’s, Robinson felt comfortable sending her the DM that would lead to “WannaCry,” the pair’s collaborative single released July 28 on I Love Cats/NLV Records. Ninajirachi arrived to Robinson’s Chapel Hill studio in early February of this year, and the pair mind-melted, if still a bit shyly.
“The idea I came to you with,” Robinson says to Ninajirachi, “I almost wasn’t sure that I wanted to show you — because I’ve had people be like ‘I made this and it made me think of you,’ and I felt like, ‘Ooh, that didn’t excite me.'”
But Ninajirachi was into the sketch, with the pair expanding upon and refining it, ultimately making something that brightly exclaims their shared predilection for punchy, synth-driven hyperpop-leaning electronic music with emotional depth and intellectual backbone. This compatibility is understandable, as, amid her meteoric rise over the last year, the 26-year-old DJ-producer has been vocal about how much she was influenced by Robinson’s music while growing up in Australia, with the pair first linking IRL when she opened for him during his 2025 Australian tour.
“And it wasn’t just your music that affected me when I was growing up,” Ninajirachi now adds. “It was your shows. Your show was my first time in a venue, in front of a PA and a massive LED. It was like my hair was being blown back. I felt like a Victorian-age child being shown like an iPod. I was just like, ‘What the f–k is this?'”
Here, the duo discuss “WannaCry,” having sympathy for a computer virus and feeling seen in each other’s work.
Tell me about the first day of having this song in the world. What’s it been like for you both?
Ninajirachi: So epic. It’s kind of everywhere. Porter, I know you’ve had so many massive songs for such a long time, but this is the most I’ve ever seen anyone share a bit of music I’ve had my name attached to. Like, everyone has turned out for this song. It’s awesome.
Robinson: It feels so instantaneous. I’m getting messages from people that I didn’t even think would like it. It feels crazy to say about your own song, but to me it kind of feels like we cooked up a little bit of a future classic. It feels like one where some people will know the song and not know the artists. That’s what I’m hoping for.
Tell me about the seeds of the idea. I know you guys have known each other for a while — was it inevitable that you’d collaborate?
Ninajirachi: It kind of started from Porter honestly, even the song idea. Porter, the collab invite was you hitting up me and seeing if I’d be down to to make music. I’m very shy in that sense. I would have never done that. I’m not like, a confident DM “Do you want to collab?” kind of person, so you made it happen. And you had the start of the song idea when I pulled up as well.
Robinson: I’m usually really shy about asking people to collaborate too, but I guess with Nina, just given that you kind of grew up on my music, I felt like that was a layup for me. I didn’t have to get nervous with like, “Is she gonna want to get in the studio with me?” I’d watched Nina’s ascent, and we had done shows together in Australia, and I just immediately liked Nina. I thought she was really funny and likable and normal and weird at the same time, and just incredibly talented, and I wanted to to know more. It feels weird to talk about this, but just knowing that my show was the first show Nina went to when you were 14, right?
Ninajirachi: Yeah.
Robinson: So if I imagine being in her shoes, if I was to get in the studio with somebody who made a big impression on me, I guess I was just feeling pressure to make something good. I wanted to have something Nina would be into. I didn’t want to flop, basically. So I cooked up a few ideas and “WannaCry,” especially the lead melody bit, was the thing I was most excited about. I wasn’t sure if Nina would be into it, but once we dove into it, Nina just slayed all the writing, and totally fixed the production on it too. Something I feel like the fans don’t know is that the bass sound got so fixed by Nina.
How so?
Robinson: This is technical, but my bass sound was just kind of whack, and Nina changed it into this amorphous flowing thing and added all these insane glitches and made the whole breakdown of the song and all the soft parts and the chorus. Some songs take me years, and when Nina and I got together, it just flowed really naturally.
Nina, was that feeling true for you as well?
Ninajirachi: Definitely. We kind of meandered a bit too. “WannaCry” was the first thing we worked on, and it’s not even that we we were stuck on it, it was more in the spirit of just trying to quick fire a bunch of ideas. We saved it, closed it, opened something else and then worked on that for a bit, and then worked on something else. Then we were kind of like, “We should go back to that first one. That was really good.”
The writing did happen very quickly, but I think Porter, you have such good pop instincts, and the reason it happened so fast — I’d spit a bunch of stuff out, but if I was on my own I would have a harder time discerning what was good or interesting. With this I’d be like, “What about this,” or “Here are five things” and you would pick one and be like “We should do that.” I’d be like, “Oh, really?” And then it was the best thing, every time.
Tell me about the title and theme. I understand it’s based off a famous computer virus?
Porter: “Wanna Cry” is this infamous ransomware attack from 2017, but the name is emotional. Like “Wanna Cry,” you think about people panicking and losing their files. It’s nostalgic and emotional and technological. I was thinking about this yesterday, about how WannaCry and also the ILOVEYOU virus [in 2000] had this like double virality, where they were literally viral in the sense that they were self-reproducing and infecting people’s computers, but they were also viral in a contemporary sense where their names were just catchy and infectious, and the idea stuck with people and spread. The WannaCry virus attack just sounds epic, you know. It sounds crazy and scary.
Ninajirachi: Porter you were like, “I have this virus concept.” [Eventually we were like] “This would be so unique if it was from the virus’ perspective.” Like it’s multiplied as far as it can go, and there are no more computers to infect, and that’s the end of its life.
You debuted it during Nina’s set at Coachella in April? How is it going off in shows?
Robinson: It’s a live bomb, in my opinion. It had been awhile since I’d made a song that was designed strictly for the dance floor, and for festivals and for electronic shows in particular. For the last few years, a lot of my songs have been very chorus-heavy, and about the vocals and the writing. This one, the vocals lead up to a more instrumental drop, and I just know how cathartic that is for people. At the shows it just feels crazy.
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Nina, you’re of course a well-established Porter fan. What would your 14-year-old self say if you told her you’d be making music with him?
Ninajirachi: It’s so crazy, Porter, sorry, I’m gonna be so embarrassing for a second, but there is totally a world where one of my favorite artists whose music has impacted my life for more than a decade never hears my music, or hears it and doesn’t f–k with it, or just doesn’t want anything to to do with me. That totally could have been a a reality.
But somehow, I landed on a timeline where Porter heard my music and f–ked with it and then asked me to open for him on tour, and then heard my album, liked it, totally got it, and invited me to be a part of this song. There are an infinite number of timelines where that didn’t happen, and life would still be so epic, but somehow I just landed on this really epic timeline.
So no, I totally would not have believed it, but Porter, thank you for f–king with my album and for understanding it and me. It’s kind of like what what you said, about how you can pull up to a session, and it’s happened to me a million times, where someone’s like “I started something I think sounds like you.” And then it’s this kind of awkward caricature, of maybe one standout element of a throughline of your work, but you can just feel they don’t entirely get you.
But musically and conceptually, I just felt so understood when Porter gave me this idea. And again, you could have never heard my music, and I still could have had the most awesome career and life. But I got to do this song, and it’s so cool. So Porter, thank you so much.
Porter, what do you think of that?
Robinson: It all feels exactly right to me. Nina, you’ve been going for a long time, and some people don’t know how dedicated you’ve been to your craft and artistry, and how long you’ve been building it. I think the world really started to get it with I Love My Computer. That was also a turning point for me, because obviously I was already rocking with you and liked your music, but the completeness of that vision — there’s something so incredibly great about Nina’s music. It’s a very narrow slice of artists that are able to make music that feels emotionally resonant, with a strong conceptual lean that’s also high-energy and not corny. It’s hard to make music that’s beautiful and emotional and high energy and have it not have some element that at least I would be allergic to.
But Nina’s music has this thing where oftentimes there’s a real vulnerability to the writing, and then the instrumentals are just absolutely sending you into the astral plane, beating you over the head while you’re hearing this thing that feels really heartfelt and kind of soft. It’s such an incredibly cool combination. It’s so obvious to me why my entire audience loves Nina, because I do too. Her music feels parallel to what I have loved my whole life.
It is a such a pleasure to witness this conversation!
Robinson: That thing about feeling understood, I relate to that so heavily too. Some of those songs that I made in the ’10s, I would hear stuff that had been influenced by it, and to me it felt like looking in a funhouse mirror. I felt misunderstood by some of the music that was influenced by that work. Now not only Nina, but Frost Children and many others are taking influence from those sounds in a way where I feel way more seen. I’m like, “Oh, y’all really loved this stuff. You really understood it. You’ve taken what was good about it, and now the world is going to see it in a whole new light.”
I was watching Nina’s show at Project Glow [this past May], and just hearing “iPod Touch” come on, I was like “Someone’s gonna film me crying right now.” Nina’s the GOAT. I’m gonna stop now, because I feel like it’s getting a bit much, but it’s a real pleasure to work alongside an artist like Nina. It means a lot to me.
Ninajirachi: Oh, thank you! Wow, that’s so crazy. I know you know it, but me and Frost Children and everyone, your music really did change our lives. Like me and Lulu [Prost, of Frost Children], the first time we met in person, we were at a diner like, “Oh my God, you have the Worlds tattoo as well!” We were exchanging stories of “Where did you get yours?” and “Where were you the first time you heard ‘Divinity’?”
Porter, I was totally changed by your music before Worlds, but with that album, you really shook up our lives and the lives of so many people, and it’s like we’re still carrying that. You did that. You’re the GOAT. Thank you so much.
Robinson: Thank you. I’m happy it meant something to people.