Meltdown 2026: Ninajirachi

The 26-year-old Australian has let her flesh-and-bone self go in favour of a manic pixie glitch girl avatar, Ninajirachi, whose much-hyped album I Love My Computer garnered rave reviews last year. Booked by Harry Styles as part of his Meltdown opening weekend, the soon-to-be-megastar crash-landed at the Southbank Centre on a warm June evening and transformed the usually demure Queen Elizabeth Hall into a sweaty, pounding club space.

From the off, the energy was manic and infectious, like a locust swarm raised on dry-grassed festival grounds and vibrating at a frequency most humans struggle to sustain. A shimmery smear of distorted synth over heavy-lidded, dead-eyed beats. Hyperpop and EDM vied with soundscapes snatched from the furthest reaches of the internet. Supersaws stacked high and threatened to collapse, whistle synths cut clean through the chest, shrieking vocal chops pitched so high they stopped sounding human and mutated into a cyborg chorus arriving from some near future. The references were clear: Skrillex, Grimes, SOPHIE, Arca — and yet the performance felt wholly original, pushing pastiche into progression. Much like her predecessors, Wilson has a rare talent for making music that feels remarkably tactile. As the speakers pulsed, you could hear a compressed history of the internet, keyboard taps and dial-up tones melding with the tangible excitement of passing a friend a USB loaded with Uffie, M.I.A. and a host of viruses from LimeWire. The music served as a kind of collective memory, the sound of growing up chronically online burnt onto CDs as much as grey matter.  

Much of the crowd had little idea what was coming. You could spot the Meltdown faithful from across the room: a programme folded under one arm and strong opinions about the running order. Early on they held their ground, arms loosely folded, wearing a patient expression as if to pride themselves on being open-minded. None of this lasted. The set operated like a slow-release toxin, working its way through the room before anyone had quite clocked what was happening. By the end of the night, the Queen Elizabeth Hall was a heaving, humid mess, and nobody looked more surprised about it than the people who had come prepared to listen quietly. Without doubt, the Southbank will not know what hit it for some time. Therein lies the true marker of a successful Meltdown: an artist so thoroughly themselves that the room must rearrange itself around them.